Losing my father made me want to find out if I could come up with a version of God or the afterlife that I could feel like was acceptable now that both my parents are in it.
Interpretation
The quote reflects on the search for personal understanding of spirituality and the afterlife after the loss of a parent.
In this quote, Tracy K. Smith expresses the profound impact of losing her father and how this loss prompts her to contemplate her beliefs about God and the afterlife. The desire to create a version of these concepts that feels acceptable suggests a personal journey of exploration and adaptation in the face of grief, highlighting the human need to find meaning in loss and the bonds that transcend it.
In practice
This quote can be shared at a memorial service to express the ongoing relationship we can have with those we've lost.
We all need poetry. The moments in our lives that are characterized by language that has to do with necessity or the market, or just, you know, things that take us away from the big questions that we have, those are the things that I think urge us to think about what a poem can offer.
I wanted to write the kind of poetry that people read and remembered, that they lived by - the kinds of lines that I carried with me from moment to moment on a given day without even having chosen to.
I love the sense of looking at the sad, paltry, and yet very familiar spectacle that we must make from moment to moment in our lives, and in our frenzy, as something that's as out there as alien life.
Prose is something that is persistent in staying in one place long enough to not only zero in on the dramatic effect of something that might have happened, or something that might have been seen, but also in watching how it played out and thinking about the cause and the effect.
A question is a pursuit, an invitation to envision and explore a series of possibilities, to struggle and empathize and doubt and believe. The question moves, whereas our sense of what an answer is can often be static, a stopping point.
I had to say to myself, 'I haven't written enough about blackness, yet it's part of my consciousness and my lived experience.' I had to get over that anxiety of 'I haven't done this before.'
The wisest man would be the one richest in contradictions, who has, as it were, antennae for all types of men---as well as his great moments of grand harmony---a rare accident even in us! A sort of planetary motion---
The great powers of the world may have done wonders in giving the world an industrial look, but the great gift still has to come from Africa - giving the world a more human face.
Occasionally, the whole class struggle may be summed up in the struggle for one word against another word. Certain words struggle amongst themselves as enemies. Other words are the site of an ambiguity: the stake in a decisive but undecided battle
Without moral and intellectual independence, there is no anchor for national independence.
A particularly beautiful woman is a source of terror. As a rule, a beautiful woman is a terrible disappointment.
He wears a mask, and his face grows to fit it.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.