Of course there is nothing the matter with the stars It is my emptiness among them While they drift farther away in the invisible morning

If you can't bear what's happening to the natural world, if you can't bear the way we treat each other; if you can't bear wars, you just can't bear the whole idea of war, which is possibly unavoidable. But still, you resist it. Because you just hate our treating each other that way and causing that suffering.

come back believer in shade believer in silence and elegance believer in ferns believer in patience believer in the rain

This is what I have heard at last the wind in December lashing the old trees with rain unseen rain racing along the tiles under the moon wind rising and falling wind with many clouds trees in the night wind.

There are poets who believe that you shouldn't engage at all in any cause. And there's something to be said for that. Because you don't want to - I think most political poetry is very bad. And it's very bad because you know too much to start with. You have a sense that you're right, and you're trying to tell other people what's right. And I think that's always kind of fundamentalism, and I don't like it.

I needed my mistakes in their order to get me here

Modern poetry, for me, began not in English at all but in Spanish, in the poems of Lorca.