William Stafford Quotes

I have woven a parachute out of everything broken.

Between roars the lion purrs.

Love in the Country

We live like this: no one but
some of the owls awake, and of them
only near ones really awake.
In the rain yesterday, puddles
on the walk to the barn sounded their
quick little drinks.

The edge of the haymow, all
soaked in moonlight,
dreams out there like silver music.
Are there farms like this where
no one likes to live?

And the sky going everywhere?
While the earth breaks the soft horizon
eastward, we study how to deserve
what has already been given us

Can injustice one way be corrected without the interim reaction that tries to impose injustice the other way?

Any Morning Just lying on the couch and being happy. Only humming a little, the quiet sound in the head. Trouble is busy elsewhere at the moment, it has so much to do in the world. People who might judge are mostly asleep; they can’t monitor you all the time, and sometimes they forget. When dawn flows over the hedge you can get up and act busy. Little corners like this, pieces of Heaven left lying around, can be picked up and saved. People won’t even see that you have them, they are so light and easy to hide. Later in the day you can act like the others. You can shake your head. You can frown.

Your job is to find out what the world is trying to be.

Learning a Word While Climbing

It was a clarity come upon
The mountains greater than the snow, a name
Pronounced among them like an opening
When a traveler finds a pass and escapes a storm.

While I was falling I saw such a light: saved,
My nylon rope came true and swung me free,
I hung above the world and saw it, never
So bright again, one long glimpse- Eternity.

Some people are blinded by their experience. Soldiers know how important war is. Owners of slaves learn every day how inferior subject peoples are.

We stood by the library. It was an August night. Priests and sisters of hundreds of unsaid creeds passed us going their separate pondered roads. We watched them cross under the corner light. Freights on the edge of town were carrying away flatcars of steel to be made into secret guns; we knew, being human, that they were enemy guns, and we were somehow vowed to poverty. No one stopped or looked long or held out a hand. They were following orders received from hour to hour, so many signals, all strange, from a foreign power: But tomorrow, you whispered, peace may flow over the land. At that corner in a flash of lightning we two stood; that glimpse we had will stare through the dark forever: on the poorest roads we would be walkers and beggars, toward some deathless meeting involving a crust of bread.

"Remembering"

When there was air, when you could
breathe any day if you liked, and if you
wanted to you could run. I used to
climb those hills back of town and
follow a gully so my eyes were at ground
level and could look out through grass as the
stems
bent in their tensile way, and see snow
mountains follow along, the way distance goes.

Now I carry those days in a tiny box
wherever I go, I open the lid like this
and let the light glimpse and then glance away.
There is a sigh like my breath when I do this.
Some days I do this again and again.

William Stafford, The Darkness Around Us Is Deep (Harper Perennial; Paperback Original edition, January 12, 1994)

...What you fear will not go away; it will take you into yourself and bless you and keep you. That's the world, and we all live there.

Cutting Loose”

Sometimes from sorrow, for no reason,
you sing. For no reason, you accept
the way of being lost, cutting loose
from all else and electing a world
where you go where you want to.

Arbitrary, a sound comes, a reminder
that a steady center is holding
all else. If you listen, that sound
will tell where it is, and you
can slide your way past trouble.

Certain twisted monsters
always bar the path – but that’s when
you get going best, glad to be lost,
learning how real it is
here on the earth, again and again.

We were traveling between a mountain and Thursday,
Holding pages back on the calendar,
Remembering every turn in the roadway:
We hold that sky, we said, and remember.
So magic a time it was that I was both brave and afraid.
Some day like this might save the world.

The greatest ownership of all is to glance around and understand.

"Today"

The ordinary miracles begin. Somewhere
a signal arrives: “Now,” and the rays
come down. A tomorrow has come. Open
your hands, lift them: morning rings
all the doorbells; porches are cells for prayer.
Religion has touched your throat. Not the same now,
you could close your eyes and go on full of light.

And it is already begun, the chord
that will shiver glass, the song full of time
bending above us. Outside, a sign:
a bird intervenes; the wings tell the air,
“Be warm.” No one is out there, but a giant
has passed through town, widening streets, touching
the ground, shouldering away the stars.