Denise Levertov
Denise Levertov
Denise Levertovwas a British-born American poet...
ProfessionPoet
Date of Birth24 October 1923
sky white light
Praise the invisible sun burning beyond the white cold sky, giving us light and the chimney's shadow.
flower light gold
slowly the pale dew-beads of light lapped up from flowers can thicken, darken to gold: honey of the human.
taken light poetry
We have the words in our pockets, obscure directions. The old ones have taken away the light of their presence....
truth light mind
I learn to affirm Truth's light at strange turns of the mind's road, wrong turns that lead over the border into wonder....
travel islands stories
we are so many and many within themselves travel to far islands but no one asks for their story....
block silence police
The vast silence of Buddha overtakes and overrules the oncoming roar of tragic life that fills alleys and avenues; it blocks the way of pedicabs, police, convoys.
animal track joy
What joy when the insouciant armadillo glances at us and doesn't quicken his trotting across the track into the palm brush. What is this joy? That no animal falters, but knows what it must do?
dream hair splits
And our dreams, with what frivolity we have pared them like toenails, clipped them like ends of split hair.
heart thinking blue
blue bead on the wick, there's that in me that burns and chills, blackening my heart with its soot, I think sometimes not Apollo heard me but a different god.
mother hypocrite men
Hypocrite women, how seldom we speak of our own doubts, while dubiously we mother man in his doubt!
sea shining world
Through the hollow globe, a ring of frayed rusty scrapiron, is it the sea that shines? Is it a road at the world's edge?
money nice wife
Don't eat those nice green dollars your wife gives you for breakfast.
men joy solitude
A blind man. I can stare at him ashamed, shameless. Or does he know it? No, he is in a great solitude. O, strange joy, to gaze my fill at a stranger's face. No, my thirst is greater than before.
life mistake spring
Do you mistake me? I am speaking of living, of moving from one moment into the next, and into the one after, breathing death in the spring air....