My last defense / Is the present tense.

Books are meat and medicine and flame and flight and flower steel, stitch, cloud and clout, and drumbeats on the air.

Poetry is life distilled.

... sometimes you have to deal / Devilishly with drowning men in order to swim them to shore.

She was afraid to suggest to him that to most people, nothing "happens." That most people merely live from day to day until they die. That, after he had been dead a year, doubtless fewer than five people would think of him oftener than once a year. That there might even come a year when no one on earth would think of him at all.

This is the urgency: Live! and have your blooming in the noise of the whirlwind.

Life for my child is simple, and is good.