The phrase I like to use to describe my sense of time-a play on comparative literature - is comparative 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.

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

A flock of sheep near the airport or a high voltage generator beside the orchard: these combinations open up my life like a wound, but they also heal it. That's why my feelings always come in twos.

I try to stay a civilian, to live as a human, not as a poet.

And as we stray further from love, we multiply the words. Had we remained together we could have become a silence.