We all find ourselves involved in projects or activities that confound us-when or why did I say I would do this? What was I thinking? I needed a poem for myself that said-pause longer. Think again.

You know, those of us who leave our homes in the morning and expect to find them there when we go back - it's hard for us to understand what the experience of a refugee might be like.

For you who came so far; for you who held out, wearing a black scarf to signify grief; for you who believe true love can find you amidst this atlas of tears linking one town to its own memory of mortar, when it was still a dream to be built and people moved there, believing, and someone with sky and birds in his heart said this would be a good place for a park.

I want to be famous in the way a pulley is famous, or a buttonhole, not because it did anything spectacular, but because it never forgot what it could do.

Mystery: Everything felt better before you got there than when you actually got there. When you actually got there, you didn't quite have the energy to be there.

During the Gulf War, I remember two little third grade girls saying to me - after I read them some poems by writers in Iraq - 'You know, we never thought about there being children in Iraq before.' And I thought, 'Well those poems did their job, because now they'll think about everything a little bit differently.'

I want to be someone making music/with my coming.