Quotes from Muriel Rukeyser

Breathe-in experience, breathe-out poetry.

Reality is the completion of experience.

Let us not fear the hidden. Or each other.

Fly down, Death: Call me:I have become a lost name.

The sources of poetry are in the spirit seeking completeness.

The world is not made of molecules, the world is made of stories.

But planted in our flesh these valleys stand, everywhere we begin to know the illness, are forced up, and our times confirm us all.

The fear of poetry is the fear.

These men breathe hard but the committee has a voice of steel.

Sloping as gracefully as thighs, the foothills narrow to this, clouds over every town finally indicate the stored destruction.

only one man lived who could understand Gibbs 's papers. That was Maxwell , and now he is dead.

The potflower on the windowsill says to me In words that are green-edged red leaves : Flower flower flower flower Today for the sake of all the dead Burst into flower

I wake up choking, and my wife "rolls me over on my left side; "then I'm asleep in the dream I always see: "the tunnel choked "the dark wall coughing dust.

The boy worked there about eighteen months, came home one evening with a shortness of breath. He said, "Mother, I cannot get my breath." Shirley was sick about three months. I would carry him from his bed to the table, from his bed to the porch. in my arms.

Did you ever bury thirty-five men in a place in back of your house, thirty-five tunnel workers the doctors didn't attend, died in the tunnel camps, under rocks, everywhere, world without end.

The scene of hope's ahead; look, April, and next month with a softer wind, maybe they'll rest upon their land, and then maybe the happy song, and love, a tall boy who was never in a tunnel.

Buried, five at a time, pine boxes, Rinehart & Dennis paid him $55 a head for burying these men in plain pine boxes. His mother is suing him: misuse of land.

Between us, love the buses at the door the long glass street two years, my death to yours my death upon your lips my face becoming glass strong challenged time making me win immortal the love a mirror of our valley our street our river a deadly glass to hold. Now they are feeding me in to a steel mill furnace O love the stream of glass a stream of living fire.

only my fingers in your hair, only, my eyes splitting the skull to tickle your brain with love in a slow caress blurring the mind, kissing your mouth awake opening the body's mouth and stopping the words. — Muriel Rukeyser, from "Three Sides of a Coin," Collected Poems of Muriel Rukeyser . (University of Pittsburgh Press May 10th 2014)

And still go down. Now ladder-mouth; and the precipitous fear, uncertain rungs down into after-night. "This is the place. Away from this my life I am indeed Adam unparadiz'd. Some fools call this the Black Hole of Calcutta, I don't know how they ever get to Congress.

It breaks the hills, cracking the riches wide, runs through electric wires; it comes, warning the night, running among these rigid hills, a single force to waken our eyes.

These are our strength, who strike against history. These whose corrupt cells owe their new styles of weakness to our diseases; these carrying light for safety on their foreheads descended deeper for richer faults of ore, drilling their death. These touching radium and the luminous poison, carried their death on their lips and with their warning glow in their graves.

All power is saved, having no end.     Rises in the green season, in the sudden season the white the budded                                              and the lost.

The days grow and the stars cross over And my wild bed turns slowly among the stars.