Quotes from Brigit Pegeen Kelly

This song is sweet. It is sweet. The heart dies of this sweetness.

have seen the heart Move like a doe through the woods, move Like a stunned doe, deeper and deeper, Through trees that turn and close behind her, The way water closes over a dropped stone, Or a torn limb, or a lasting wound … from "Botticelli's St. Sebastian

Be thou always ravished by love, starlight running Down and pulling back the veil of the heart, — Brigit Pegeen Kelly, from "Plants Fed On by Fawns," The Orchard: Poems (BOA Editions,2004)

and the air Was like the air after a fire, or the air before a storm, Ungodly still, but full of dark shapes turning. from "The Dragon

A]nd the unveiled figure Of the self stepping unclothed, sweetly stripped Of its leaf, into starlight, and the shadow of night, The cold water warm around the narrow ankles, The body at its most weightless, a thing so durable It will–like the carved stone figures holding up The temple roof–stand and remember its gods Long after those gods have been forsaken. —Brigit Pegeen Kelly, from "Plants Fed On by Fawns," The Orchard (BOA Editions, Ltd., 2004)

And I knew you, a swelling in the heart, A silence in the heart, the wild wind-blown grass Burning–as the sun falls below the earth– Brighter than a bed of lilies struck by snow. — Brigit Pegeen Kelly, from "Elegy," The Orchard: Poems (BOA Editions Ltd., 2004)