The soul inside me is the last foreign language I'm learning.

The memory of my father is wrapped up in white paper, like sandwiches taken for a day of work. Just as a magician takes towers and rabbits out of his hat, he drew love from his small body.

Love is like a reservoir of kindness and pleasure, like silos and pools during a siege.

And I said to myself: That's true, hope needs to be like barbed wire to keep out despair, hope must be a mine field.

The reason a poet is a poet is to write poems, not to advertise himself as a poet.

My poems are political in the deeper sense of the word. Political means to live in your time, to be a man of your time.

I've often said that all poetry is political. This is because real poems deal with a human response to reality and politics is part of reality, history in the making. Even if a poet writes about sitting in a glass house drinking tea, it reflects politics.