The grass as bristly and stout as chives and me wondering when the ground will break and me wondering how anything fragile survives
Interpretation
This quote reflects on the resilience of fragile things in nature amidst tough conditions.
In this quote, Anne Sexton uses vivid imagery to ponder the strength and fragility of life. The comparison of the grass to chives conveys a sense of harsh resilience, prompting the speaker to reflect on the delicate balance of survival within a seemingly unforgiving environment.
In practice
In a discussion about environmental resilience during a presentation.
The Witch's Life" When I was a child there was an old woman in our neighborhood whom we called The Witch. All day she peered from her second story window from behind the wrinkled curtains and sometimes she would open the window and yell: Get out of my life! She had hair like kelp and a voice like a boulder. I think of her sometimes now and wonder if I am becoming her.
Do you like me?” No answer. Silence bounced, fell off his tongue and sat between us and clogged my throat. It slaughtered my trust. It tore cigarettes out of my mouth. We exchanged blind words, and I did not cry, I did not beg, but blackness filled my ears, blackness lunged in my heart, and something that had been good, a sort of kindly oxygen, turned into a gas oven.
Don't bite till you know if it's bread or stone.
Abundance is scooped from abundance yet abundance remains.
I find now, swallowing one teaspoon of pain, that it drops downward to the past where it mixes with last year’s cupful and downward into a decade’s quart and downward into a lifetime’s ocean. I alternate treading water and deadman’s float.
I am your dwarf. I am the enemy within. I am the boss of your dreams. See. Your hand shakes. It is not palsy or booze. It is your Doppelganger trying to get out. Beware...Beware...
We can't blame children for occupying themselves with Facebook rather than playing in the mud. Our society doesn't put a priority on connecting with nature. In fact, too often we tell them it's dirty and dangerous.
When nature made the blue-bird she wished to propitiate both the sky and the earth, so she gave him the color of the one on his back and the hue of the other on his breast.
In Holland and Belgium, and afterwards in England, my happiest moments were in the country. I've always had a passion for the outdoors, for trees, for birds and flowers.
Nature in America has always been suspect, on the defensive, cannibalized by progress. In America, every specimen becomes a relic.
The most irrevocable of [natures] laws says that a species cannot occupy a niche that appropriates all resources--there has to be some sharing. Any species that ignores this law winds up destroying its community to support its own expansion.
The sweet small clumsy feet of april came into the ragged meadow of my soul.
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