Devotion

by Patti Smith

The prospect of boarding a plane without a book produces a wave of panic. The right book can serve as a docent of sorts, setting a tone or even altering the course of a journey.

heat drawn from the well of devotion that is the female heart.

It occurs to me that the young look beautiful as they sleep and the old, such as myself, look dead.

There was an absence of light, but not of love.

Most often the alchemy that produces a poem or a work of fiction is hidden within the work itself, if not embedded in the coiling ridges of the mind.