William Stafford Quotes

Yes

It could happen any time, tornado,
earthquake, Armageddon. It could happen.
Or sunshine, love, salvation.

It could, you know. That's why we wake
and look out - no guarantees
in this life.

But some bonuses, like morning,
like right now, like noon,
like evening.

In every town we lived in, there was one great big door ready to open for anyone — the library. And I never met a library I didn’t like.

Poetry Its door opens near. It’s a shrine by the road, it’s a flower in the parking lot of The Pentagon, it says, “Look around, listen. Feel the air.” It interrupts international telephone lines with a tune. When traffic lines jam, it gets out and dances on the bridge. If great people get distracted by fame they forget this essential kind of breathing and they die inside their gold shell. When caravans cross deserts it is the secret treasure hidden under the jewels.

Lines to Stop Talking By

In your city today outside my room
Some quiet animal or only the rain
At its patient task was opening the wall
By touching it, and whatever was there
Spread outward a bit at a time toward the horizon
Cresting ahead and breaking, the way
All through your life whatever is near extends
When you think. In your city today
I thought of Never, hiding inside
An iceberg floating south rinsed by the days
Till that great blind ice blinks open in the center.
I heard an ambulance carry its banner away
In the rain in your city. And I thought of
My poems- how they are always there
Waiting to try for that circumference
It takes all of us to find.

Next time what I'd do is look at
the earth before saying anything. I'd stop
just before going into a house
and be an emperor for a minute
and listen better to the wind
or to the air being still.

When anyone talked to me, whether
blame or praise or just passing time,
I'd watch the face, how the mouth
has to work, and see any strain, any
sign of what lifted the voice.

And for all, I'd know more — the earth
bracing itself and soaring, the air
finding every leaf and feather over
forest and water, and for every person
the body glowing inside the clothes
like a light.

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?

"Father and son

No sound - a spell- on, on out
where the wind went, our kite sent back
its thrill along the string that
sagged but sang and said, "I'm here!
I'm here!" - till broke somewhere,
gone years ago, but sailed forever clear
of earth. I hold-whatever tugs
the other end-I hold that string."

Once we have tasted far streams, touched the gold, found some limit beyond the waterfall, a season changes and we come back changed but safe, quiet, grateful.

B.C.

The seed that met water spoke a little name.

(Great sunflowers were lording the air that day;
This was before Jesus, before Rome; that other air
Was readying our hundreds of years to say things
That rain has beat down on over broken stones
And heaped behind us in many lands.)

Quiet in the earth a drop of water came,
And the little seed spoke: “Sequoia is my name.

Once you decide to do right, life is easy, there are no distractions.

"Sometimes from sorrow, for no reason,
you sing.

from "Cutting Loose

Assurance You will never be alone, you hear so deep a sound when autumn comes. Yellow pulls across the hills and thrums, or the silence after lightning before it says its names — and then the clouds’ wide-mouthed apologies. You were aimed from birth: you will never be alone. Rain will come, a gutter filled, an Amazon, long aisles — you never heard so deep a sound, moss on rock, and years. You turn your head — that’s what the silence meant: you’re not alone. The whole wide world pours down.

The Poets’ Annual Indigence Report”

Tonight beyond the determined moon,
aloft with nothing left that is voluntary
for delight, everything uttering hydrogen,
your thinkers are mincing along through a hail of contingencies,

While we all–floating though we are, lonesome though we are,
lost in hydrogen–we live by seems things:
when things just are, then something else
will be doing the living.

Doing is not enough; being is not enough;
knowing is far from enough. So we clump around, putting
feet on the dazzle floor, awaiting the real schedule
by celebrating the dazzle schedule.

And, whatever is happening, we are here;
a lurch or a god has brought us together.
We do our jobs–listening in fear
in endless, friendless, Jesus-may-happen fashion.

Our shadows ride over the grass, your shadows, ours: –
Rich men, wise men, be our contemporaries.

"When I Met My Muse"

I glanced at her and took my glasses
off — they were still singing, They buzzed
like a locust on the coffee table and then
ceased. Her voice belled forth, and the
sunlight bent. I felt the ceiling arch, and
knew that nails up there took a new grip
on whatever they touched. “I am your own
way of looking at things,” she said. “When
you allow me to live with you, every
glance at the world around you will be
a sort of salvation.” And I took her hand