Selected Poems of Mark Strand Quotes

“Ink runs from the corners of my mouth.
There is no happiness like mine.
I have been eating poetry.”
― Mark Strand, Selected Poems of Mark Strand

“Even this late it happens:
the coming of love, the coming of light.”
― Mark Strand, Selected poems

“When I walk
I part the air
and always
the air moves in
to fill the spaces
where my body's been.”
― Mark Strand, Selected Poems of Mark Strand

“Lines for Winter"

Tell yourself
as it gets cold and gray falls from the air
that you will go on
walking, hearing
the same tune no matter where
you find yourself—
inside the dome of dark
or under the cracking white
of the moon's gaze in a valley of snow.
Tonight as it gets cold
tell yourself
what you know which is nothing
but the tune your bones play
as you keep going. And you will be able
for once to lie down under the small fire
of winter stars.
And if it happens that you cannot
go on or turn back
and you find yourself
where you will be at the end,
tell yourself
in that final flowing of cold through your limbs
that you love what you are.”
― Mark Strand, Selected Poems of Mark Strand

“Keeping Things Whole"

In a field
I am the absence
of field.
This is
always the case.
Wherever I am
I am what is missing.

When I walk
I part the air
and always
the air moves in
to fill the spaces
where my body's been.

We all have reasons
for moving.
I move
to keep things whole.”
― Mark Strand, Selected Poems of Mark Strand

“I grow into my death.
My life is small
and getting smaller. The world is green.
Nothing is all.”
― Mark Strand, Selected Poems of Mark Strand

“VII"

Oh you can make fun of the splendors of moonlight,
But what would the human heart be if it wanted
Only the dark, wanted nothing on earth

But the sea’s ink or the rock’s black shade?
On a summer night to launch yourself into the silver
Emptiness of air and look over the pale fields

At rest under the sullen stare of the moon,
And to linger in the depths of your vision and wonder
How in this whiteness what you love is past

Grief, and how in the long valley of your looking
Hope grows, and there, under the distant,
Barely perceptible fire of all the stars,

To feel yourself wake into change, as if your change
Were immense and figured into the heavens’ longing.
And yet all you want is to rise out of the shade

Of yourself into the cooling blaze of a summer night
When the moon shines and the earth itself
Is covered and silent in the stoniness of its sleep.”
― Mark Strand, Selected Poems of Mark Strand

“And if it happens that you cannot
go on or turn back and you find yourself
where you will be at the end,
tell yourself
in that final flowing of cold through your limbs
that you love what you are.

— Mark Strand, from “Lines for Winter,” Selected Poems. (Knopf September 26, 1990)”
― Mark Strand, Selected Poems of Mark Strand