“All night wild impulses
The only way to find a path
is to set fire to your life.”

Outside my window
sienna eyes of towhee
true gift of winter
No roomful of gifts—
many Christmases have passed
without my father
Ribbons of white glitter
against wintry blue sky
 murmur of snow geese
“You are the butterfly and you are gone.”
“Always be a poet, even in prose.”
“Poetry is from the frontiers of consciousness.”
“The only thing that can save the world is the reclaiming of the awareness of the world. That’s what poetry does.”
“I think poetry must stay open all night in beautiful cellars.”
“We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospection.”
“Poetry is sort of a homecoming.”
“Poetry is a lion because it eats and intensifies natural speech.”
“Poetry is the utterance of deep and heart-felt truth:
the true poet is near the oracle.”
“Poetry is the eternal graffiti written in the heart of everyone.”
“Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.”
“The poetry of the earth is never dead.”
“Words are alive — cut them and they bleed.”
“Poetry heals the wounds inflicted by reason.”
“A poet looks at the world the way a man looks at a woman.”
“A poet must achieve a balance between solitude and solidarity, between feeling
and action, between intimacy of mankind and the revelation of nature.”
“Wine is bottled poetry.”
“All night wild impulses
The only way to find a path
is to set fire to your life.”
“Poetry is like a bird, it ignores all frontiers.”
“The Kings who have died one by one are now reborn in poet’s hearts.”
“All night wild impulses
The only way to find a path
is to set fire to your life.”
A poet and writer of the natural world, Terri Glass mentored under William Stafford and Robert Bly.