Denise Levertov
Denise Levertov
Denise Levertovwas a British-born American poet...
ProfessionPoet
Date of Birth24 October 1923
world ends threat
The threat of world's end is the old threat.
hair honey dropping
Beespittle, droppings, hairs of beefur: all become honey. Virulent micro-organisms cannot survive in honey.
flower light gold
slowly the pale dew-beads of light lapped up from flowers can thicken, darken to gold: honey of the human.
white fog black
The last cobwebs of fog in the black firtrees are flakes of white ash in the world's hearth.
night years numbers
Among a hundred windows shining dully in the vast side of greater-than-palace number such-and-such one burns these several years, each night as if the room within were aflame.
dark space water
Let the space under the first storey be dark, let the water lap the stone posts, and vivid green slime glimmer upon them; let a boat be kept there.
wall mountain wavering
Mountain, mountain, mountain, marking time. Each nameless, wall beyond wall, wavering redefinition of horizon.
block silence police
The vast silence of Buddha overtakes and overrules the oncoming roar of tragic life that fills alleys and avenues; it blocks the way of pedicabs, police, convoys.
animal track joy
What joy when the insouciant armadillo glances at us and doesn't quicken his trotting across the track into the palm brush. What is this joy? That no animal falters, but knows what it must do?
dream hair splits
And our dreams, with what frivolity we have pared them like toenails, clipped them like ends of split hair.
clouds watches sun
I watch the clouds as I see them in pomp advancing, pursuing the fallen sun.
travel islands stories
we are so many and many within themselves travel to far islands but no one asks for their story....
prayer spring flames
At Delphi I prayed to Apollo that he maintain in me the flame of the poem and I drank of the brackish spring there....
butterfly touching paper
Let me walk through the fields of paper touching with my wand dry stems and stunted butterflies....