Poetry is a fireplace in summer or a fan in winter.
Robert HassRead
Sometimes from this hillside just after sunset The rim of the sky takes on a tinge Of the palest green, like the flesh of a cucumber When you peel it carefully.
Interpretation
The quote describes a beautiful and fleeting moment in nature, highlighting the delicate colors visible at sunset.
In this quote, Robert Hass captures the enchanting beauty of a sunset from a hillside, comparing the soft green hues of the sky to the tender flesh of a cucumber. It evokes an appreciation for natural wonders and the subtle details in the world around us, encouraging mindfulness and reflection on such ephemeral moments.
In practice
This quote can be used in a speech about the importance of appreciating nature's beauty.
Poetry is a fireplace in summer or a fan in winter.
Take the time to write. You can do your life's work in half an hour a day.
I think that the job of poetry, its political job, is to refresh the idea of justice, which is going dead in us all the time.
There are moments when the body is as numinous as words, days that are the good flesh continuing. Such tenderness, those afternoons and evenings, saying blackberry, blackberry, blackberry.
When I was younger, I was so crazy about poetry that I didn't notice who was noticing. It seemed to me so tremendous and large.
Writing is an incessant process of discovery.
Why did not somebody teach me the constellations, and make me at home in the starry heavens, which are always overhead, and which I don't half know to this day?
Corn wind in the fall, come off the black lands, come off the whisper of the silk hangers, the lap of the flat spear leaves.
I drive a hybrid, and we've changed our light bulbs and windows and installed solar panels and geothermal ground source heat pumps and most everything else.
What a thing it is to sit absolutely alone, in the forest, at night, cherished by this wonderful, unintelligible, perfectly innocent speech, the most comforting speech in the world, the talk that rain makes by itself all over the ridges, and the talk of the watercourses everywhere in the hollows! Nobody started it, nobody is going to stop it. It will talk as long as it wants this rain. As long as it talks I am going to listen.
The question is, are we happy to suppose that our grandchildren may never be able to see an elephant except in a picture book?
Naturalists, like poets, are born and then made only by years of painstaking observation.
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