Nathalia Crane Quotes

Oh, we have had great lovers that we followed to the pyre; Our boasts out-do the Sabine girls—the Mosque of St. Sophia. And we are very sure of ours, for when a city falls, They seize us and they love us and they hurl us from the walls.

When you return, the youngest of the seers, Released from fetters of ancestral pose, There will be beauty waiting down the years — Revisions of the ruby and the rose.

Great is the rose Infected by the tomb, Yet burgeoning Indifferent to death.

Let go the lure The striving to unmake; Behold the truth Whenever heart may ache There is a glory In a great mistake.

Once a pallid Vestal Doubted truth in blue; Listed red in ruin, Harried every hue; Barricaded vision, Garbed herself in sighs; Ridiculed the birthmarks Of the butterflies.

The starry brocade of the summer night Is linked to us as part of our estate; And every bee that wings its sidelong flight Assurance of a sweeter, fairer fate.

Said the tiger to the lily, Said the viper to the rose, Let us marry so our children May attain the double pose. With a feline half a flower — With the attar in the asp We could institute a slaughter That would make a planet gasp.

Cloud-made mountains towered, Beckoning to me; Visionary triremes Talked about the sea...

In the darkness, who would answer for the color of a rose, Or the vestments of the May moth and the pilgrimage it goes?

A single-motored miracle, a lead mine on each flank; Below a shadow swept and awed the hundred-fathom bank.

And the eyes of all look upward seeing sign-word drawing nigh, The stony wings of Egypt coming back across the sky; We hear the clinking tamborine of Miriam anew; We believe in every miracle since Lindbergh flew the blue — The wonder of the long draw when the bowstring is a thread — The beauty of a courage that can raise the wings of lead.

You cannot choose your battlefield,
God does that for you;
But you can plant a standard
Where a standard never flew. <small> QOTD 2007·11·01 Sound file </small>

The very serpents bite their tails; the bees forget to sting, For a language so celestial setteth up a wondering. And the touch of absent mindedness is more than any line, Since direction counts for nothing when the gods set up a sign.

Treating the sword blade the same as the staff, Turning the chariot wheel into chaff. Toppling a pillar and nudging a wall, Building a sand pile to counter each fall. Yielding to nothing — not even the rose, The dust has its reasons wherever it goes.

He'll carry me off, I know that he will, For his hair is exceedingly red; And the only thing that occurs to me Is to dutifully shiver in bed.