Poetry is a life-cherishing force.
For poems are not words, after all,
but fires for the cold, ropes let down to the lost,
something as necessary as bread in the pockets of the hungry.
~Mary Oliver from A Poetry Handbook

…I want to write with quiet hands. I
want to write while crossing the fields that are
fresh with daisies and everlasting and the
ordinary grass. I want to make poems while thinking of
the bread of heaven and the
cup of astonishment; let them be
songs in which nothing is neglected,
not a hope, not a promise. I want to make poems
that look into the earth and the heavens
and see the unseeable. I want them to honor
both the heart of faith, and the light of the world;
the gladness that says, without any words, everything.
~Mary Oliver from “Everything” from New and Selected Poems: Volume Two

Poetry may make us from time to time
a little more aware
of the deeper, unnamed feelings
which form the substratum of our being,
to which we rarely penetrate;
for our lives are mostly a constant evasion of ourselves.
—T.S. Eliot from The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism

Much of the time, on the surface, we appear a tangled mess –
a jumble of unarticulated feelings and desires, needs and wants.

Deeper down, there is a hungry soul in a place that can’t be seen.

We rarely dip in there; it can be a sore spot we are tempted to touch
but avoid doing so because of its tenderness.

The bright light of a few well chosen words can ring us like a bell;
we are struck dumb finding such clarion clarity comes
to a place so well hidden.

A rope of words drops to lift up the lost and sad and empty –
a reminder mere words can rescue and revive.