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.'
If you haven't got any charity in your heart, you have the worst kind of heart trouble.
Of all writings I love only that which is written with blood. Write with blood: and you will discover that blood is spirit.
If you think you're free, there's no escape possible.
After such knowledge, what forgiveness? Think now History has many cunning passages, contrived corridors And issues, deceives with whispering ambitions Guides us by vanities.
Well, Page, I do wish the Devil had old Cooke, for I am sure I never was so tired of an old dull scoundrel in my life ... But the old-fellows say we must read to gain knowledge; and gain knowledge to make us happy and be admired. Mere jargon! Is there any such thing as happiness in this world? No.
The soul...is audible, not visible.
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