William Stafford Quotes

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.

A poem is a serious joke, a truth that has learned jujitsu.

"Waiting for God"

This morning I breathed in. It had rained
early and the sycamore leaves tapped
a few drops that remained, while waving
the air's memory back and forth
over the lawn and into our open
window. Then I breathed out.

This deliberate day eased
past the calendar and waited. Patiently
the sun instructed the shadows how to move;
it held them, guided their gradual defining.
In the great quiet I carried my life on,
in again, out again.

I keep following this sort of hidden river of my life, you know, whatever the topic or impulse which comes, I follow it along trustingly. And I don't have any sense of its coming to a kind of crescendo, or of its petering out either. It is just going steadily along.

Malheur Before Dawn
An owl sound wandered along the road with me.
I didn’t hear it- I breathed it into my ears.

Little ones at first, the stars retired, leaving
Polished little circles on the sky for a while.

Then the sun began to shout from below the horizon.
Throngs of birds campaigned, their music a tent of song.

From across a pond, out of the mist,
One drake made a V and said its name.

Some vast animal of air began to rouse
From the reeds and lean outward.

Frogs discovered their national anthem again.
I didn’t know a ditch could hold so much joy.

So magic a time it was that I was both brave and afraid.
Some day like this might save the world.

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.

Dandelion cavalry, light little saviors,
baffle the wind, they ride so light.
They surround a church and outside the window
utter their deaf little cry: “If you listen
well, music won’t have to happen.”

After service they depart singly
to mention in the world their dandelion faith:
'God is not big; He is right.

"Scars"

They tell how it was, and how time
came along, and how it happened
again and again. They tell
the slant life takes when it turns
and slashes your face as a friend.

Any wound is real. In church
a woman lets the sun find
her cheek, and we see the lesson:
there are years in that book; there are sorrows
a choir can't reach when they sing.

Rows of children lift their faces of promise,
places where the scars will be.

William Stafford, Americans’ Favorite Poems edited by Maggie Dietz and Robert Pinsky (W. W. Norton & Company; 1st edition, November 1, 1999)

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

I'll be Pavlov, you be the dog.

This monument is for the unknown good in our enemies. Like a picture their life began to appear: they gathered at home in the evening and sang. Above their fields they saw a new sky. A holiday came and they carried the baby to the park for a party. Sunlight surrounded them. Here we glimpse what our minds long turned away from. The great mutual blindness darkened that sunlight in the park, and the sky that was new, and the holidays. This monument says that one afternoon we stood here letting a part of our minds escape. They came back, but different. Enemy: one day we glimpsed your life. This monument is for you.

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.

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.

"Let my dreams while I’m wide-awake
loose. Let me be drowned, baptized,
in the light given me. Day comes around,
night, fall, winter, spring,
summer. Leaves overhead, underfoot.
Waves arrive, buffets from friends
offended, enemies. Let it all come:
this is my way, this is the canoe I’m in. "Adrift

"They miss the whisper that runs
any day in your mind,
"Who are you really, wanderer?" — and the answer you have to give
no matter how dark and cold
the world around you is:
"Maybe I'm a king.