“You are the butterfly and you are gone.”
They arrived
white-crowned, golden-crowned sparrows—
winter's mark.
Frost on top of snow
my boots create the crunch
of potato chips.
Seven robins dot
the empty lot next door
 soon snowmelt.
“Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.”
“Poetry is sort of a homecoming.”
“Poetry is the utterance of deep and heart-felt truth:
the true poet is near the oracle.”
“A poet looks at the world the way a man looks at a woman.”
“You are the butterfly and you are gone.”
“Wine is bottled poetry.”
“I think poetry must stay open all night in beautiful cellars.”
“Poetry is the eternal graffiti written in the heart of everyone.”
“Poetry is a lion because it eats and intensifies natural speech.”
“Poetry is like a bird, it ignores all frontiers.”
“Poetry heals the wounds inflicted by reason.”
“Poetry is from the frontiers of consciousness.”
“All night wild impulses
The only way to find a path
is to set fire to your life.”
“The only thing that can save the world is the reclaiming of the awareness of the world. That’s what poetry does.”
“The Kings who have died one by one are now reborn in poet’s hearts.”
“A poet must achieve a balance between solitude and solidarity, between feeling
and action, between intimacy of mankind and the revelation of nature.”
“Words are alive — cut them and they bleed.”
“Always be a poet, even in prose.”
“The poetry of the earth is never dead.”
“We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospection.”
“You are the butterfly and you are gone.”
A poet and writer of the natural world, Terri Glass mentored under William Stafford and Robert Bly.