I am a woman in the prime of my life, with certain powers and those powers severely limited by authorities whose faces I rarely see.

Life on the planet is born of woman.

I don’t think we can separate art from overall human dignity and hope.

The more I live, the more I think, two people together is a miracle.

War is an absolute failure of imagination, scientific and political.

I think poets should work in the non-literary, non-academic world, get to know more than a workshop or a university.

When the landscape buckles and jerks around, when a dust column of debris rises from the collapse of a block of buildings on bodies that could have been your own, when the staves of history fall awry and the barrel of time bursts apart, some turn to prayer, some to poetry: words in the memory, a stained book carried close to the body, the notebook scribbled by hand--a center of gravity.