Quotes from Tracy K. Smith

Why Do we insist our lives are ours?

Who can say the word love When everything--everything--pushes back with the promise To grind itself to dust?

I am not What you intend me to be.

The point is, you won't necessarily know Whether you're living a science fiction reality.

the blue hours between three and five

America, there is not a place I can wander inside you and not feel a little afraid.

Somewhere in every life there is a line. One side to the other and you are gone. Not disappeared, but undone.

What's heavy Grounds us to the world.

And it's not the future their eyes see, But history. It stretches Like a dry road uphill before them. They climb it.

I am you, one day out of five, Tired, empty, hating what I carry But afraid to lay it down, stingy, Angry, doing violence to others By the sheer freight of my gloom, Halfway home, wanting to stop, to quit But keeping going mostly out of spite.

THE EVERLASTING SELF Comes in from a downpour Shaking water in every direction — A collaborative condition: Gathered, shed, spread, then Forgotten, reabsorbed. Like love From a lifetime ago, and mud A dog has tracked across the floor.

And then I think, maybe that's what we are. An accidental spectacle.

I am alive in 21st Century America. I have a voice. Let it serve as a corrective to the violent and reckless power that stands against the force of love.

We wept to be reminded of such color.

When I was young, my father was lord Of a small kingdom: a wife, a garden, Kids for whom his word was Word. It took years for my view to harden, To shrink him to human size.