We Shall Find Peace - Anton Chekhov

"We shall find peace. We shall hear angels, we shall see the sky sparkling with diamonds."

From Mudbound, by Hillary Jordan

I fell in loe with my brother-in-law the way you fall asleepin the car when someone you trust is driving--gradually, by imperceptible degrees, letting the motion lull your eyes closed. Letting, that's the keyword.

Look to the Day - Sanskrit

Yesterday is already a dream, tomorrow is only a vision, but today ,well lived, makes every yesterday a dream of happiness, every tomorrow a vision of hope.

- Contributed by Don Warner

So Small A Thing - Matthew Arnold

It is so small a thing
to have enjoyed the sun
to have lived with the light
to have loved, to have felt and thought,
to have done.

- Contributed by Don Warner

Time is the Mercy of Eternity- Kenneth Rexroth

The long sunlight is golden
On the deep green grass and bright
Red flowers of the meadow.
I stop where I meander,
The brook forms a deep pool.
The water is greenish brown
But perfectly transparent
A small dense cloud of hundreds
Of midges, no bigger than my head,
hovers over it,
On the bank two small frogs.
In the water are beetles
Hydras, waterbugs, larvae
of several insects
It is like peering into an inkspot
and finding yourself staring
Out into the Milky Way
The deep vibration of my identity
With all this plentitude of life
Leaves me shaken and giddy.
I step softly across the meadow.

Little Gidding- by T.S.Eliot

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Through the unknown , remembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning,
At the source of the longest river
The voice of the hidden waterfall.

The Sea- By Donald Hall

The drunken waves argue
the same sentences
over and over, as if
no one will understand them.

Splendour in the Grass -William Wordsworth

What though the radiance
which was once so bright
Be now for ever taken from my sight,
Though nothing can bring back the hour
Of splendour in the grass,
of glory in the flower,
We will grieve not, rather find
Strength in what remains behind;
In the primal sympathy
Which having been must ever be;
In the soothing thoughts that spring
Out of human suffering;
In the faith that looks through death,
In years that bring the philosophic mind.

From: "A Few Figs from Thistles" -Edna St. Vincent Millay

My candle burns at both ends
It will not last the night;
But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends
It gives a lovely light.


1920US poet (1892 - 1950)

From: A Ship Made of Paper

“The sky is dark blue and the autumn sun is warm and steady, as if promising that winter will never arrive. A slow breeze moves down the street, carrying the perfume of the slowly dying leaves, a nearby field’s last mowing, the river. What can the world do to you with its beauty? Can it lift you up on its shoulders, as if you were a hero, can it whoopsie-daisy you up in to its arms as if you were a child? Can it goad your timid heart, urge you on to finally seize what you most shamefully desire? Yes, yes, all that and more. The world can crush you with its beauty.”

- A Ship Made of Paper by Scott Spencer

Cloths of Heaven

Had I the heavens' embroidered cloths,
Enrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and half-light,

I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.
W.B.Yeats

From "Spoon River Anthology" - E.L. Masters

Where are Ella, Kate, Mag, Lizzie and Edith,
The tender heart, the simple soul, the loud, the proud, the happy one?--
All, all are sleeping on the hill.

One died in shameful child-birth,
One of a thwarted love,
One at the hands of a brute in a brothel,
One of a broken pride, in the search for heart's desire;
One after life in far-away London and Paris
Was brought to her little space by Ella and Kate and Mag--
All, all are sleeping, sleeping, sleeping on the hill.

Where are Uncle Isaac and Aunt Emily,
And old Towny Kincaid and Sevigne Houghton,
And Major Walker who had talked With venerable men of the revolution?--
All, all are sleeping on the hill.

Edgar Lee Masters