Whylah Falls Quotes

“In school, I hated poetry - those skinny,
Malnourished poems that professors love;
The bad grammar and dirty words that catch
In the mouth like fishhooks, tear holes in speech.
Pablo, your words are rain I run through,
Grass I sleep in.”
― George Elliott Clarke, Whylah Falls

“The moon twangs its silver strings;
The river swoons into town;
The wind beds down in the pines,
Covers itself with stars.”
― George Elliott Clarke, Whylah Falls

“I know that this traitor language can turn
One truth into another or even
Against itself. Yet, it is all we have.”
― George Elliott Clarke, Whylah Falls

“A rural Venus, Selah rises from the
gold foliage of the Sixhiboux River, sweeps
petals of water from her skin. At once,
clouds begin to sob for such beauty.
Clothing drops like leaves.

"No one makes poetry,my Mme.
Butterfly, my Carmen, in Whylah,”
I whisper. She smiles: “We’ll shape it with
our souls.”

Desire illuminates the dark manuscript
of our skin with beetles and butterflies.
After the lightning and rain has ceased,
after the lightning and rain of lovemaking
has ceased, Selah will dive again into the
sunflower-open river.”
― George Elliott Clarke, Whylah Falls

“Roses
got thorns.
And words
do lie.

I've seen love
die.”
― George Elliott Clarke, Whylah Falls

“Bee’s Wings

This washed-out morning, April rain descants,
Weeps over gravity, the broken bones
Of gravel and graveyards, and Cora puts
Away gold dandelions to sugar
And skew into gold wine, then discloses
That Pablo gutted his engine last night
Speeding to Beulah Beach under a moon
As pocked and yellowed as aged newsprint.
Now, Othello, famed guitarist, heated
By rain-clear rum, voices transparent notes
Of sad, anonymous heroes who hooked
Mackerel and slept in love-pried-open thighs
And gave out booze in vain crusades to end
Twenty centuries of Christianity.
His voice is simple, sung air: without notes,
There's nothing. His unknown, imminent death
(The feel of iambs ending as trochees
In a slow, decasyllabic death-waltz;
His vertebrae trellised on his stripped spine
Like a 'xylophone or keyboard of nerves)
Will also be nothing: the sun pours gold
Upon Shelley, his sis', light as bees' wings,
Who roams a garden sprung from rotten wood
And words, picking green nouns and fresh, bright verbs,
For there's nothing I will not force language
To do to make us one — whether water
Hurts like whisky or the sun burns like oil
Or love declines to weathered names on stone.

George Elliott Clarke, Whylah Falls (1990)”
― George Elliott Clarke, Whylah Falls

“For there’s nothing I will not force language
To do to make us one — whether water
Hurts like whisky or the sun burns like oil
Or love declines to weathered names on stone.

—George Elliott Clarke, from “Bees’ Wings,” Whylah Falls (1990)”
― George Elliott Clarke, Whylah Falls