We're losing a species every few seconds. We cannot put them back. If we change our mind and say, 'Oops, we made a mistake' - it's too late. This is the world we live with.

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

I think there's a kind of desperate hope built into poetry that one really wants, hopelessly, to save the world. One is trying to say everything that can be said for the things that one loves while there's still time.

You grieve Not that heaven does not exist but That it exists without us

From what we cannot hold the stars are made.

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

We are not born to survive. Only to live.