“War is an absolute failure of imagination, scientific and political.”

We must use what we have to invent what we desire.

Across the curve of the earth, there are women getting up before dawn, in the blackness before the point of light, in the twilight before sunrise; there are women rising earlier than men and children to break the ice, to start the stove, to put up the pap.

The beauty of darkness is how it lets you see.

The necessity of poetry has to be stated over and over, but only to those who have reason to fear its power.

I think of poetry as something out there in the world and within each of us. I don’t mean that everyone can write poetry – it’s an art, a craft.

When a woman tells the truth she is creating the possibility for more truth around her.

You must write, and read, as if your life depended on it.

The [Vietnam War Memorial] Wall became a magnet for citizens of every generation, class, race, and relationship to the war perhaps because it is the only great public monument that allows the anesthetized holes in the heart to fill with a truly national grief.

I am the androgyne, I am the living mind you fail to describe in your dead language the lost noun, the verb surviving only in the infinitive the letters of my name are written under the lids of the newborn child

Poetry reaches into places in us that we are suppose to ignore or mistrust, that are perceived as subversive or non-useful, in what is fast becoming known as global culture.

Show us to ourselves when we are outlawed or made invisible, remind us of beauty where no beauty seems possible, remind us of kinship where all is represented as separation.

Young people know they are being betrayed by he mass electronic media. It caricatures them, caricatures others.

If you teach, you see this is not true. It may be that newer generations do not worship the text as some of their elders do.

Life on the planet is born of woman.

and I ask myself and you, which of our visions will claim us which will we claim how will we go on living how will we touch, what will we know what will we say to each other.

TV has created a kind of false collectivity.