The Southern Cross Quotes

“There is an otherness inside us
We never touch,
no matter how far down our hands reach.
It is the past,
with its good looks and Anytime, Anywhere ...
Our prayers go out to it, our arms go out to it
Year after year,
But who can ever remember enough?”
― Charles Wright, The Southern Cross

“The life of this world is wind
Windblown we come, and windblown we go away.
All that we look on is windfall.
All we remember is wind.”
― Charles Wright, The Southern Cross

“Friday beneath the sky, its little postcards of melancholy
Outside each window,
the engines inside the roses at half speed,
The huge page of the sea with its one word despair,
Fuchsia blossoms littered across the deck,
Unblotted tide pools of darkness beneath the ferns …
And still I go on looking,
match after match in the black air.”
― Charles Wright, The Southern Cross

“What we are given in dreams we write as blue paint,
Or messages to the clouds.
At evening we wait for the rain to fall and the sky to clear.
Our words are words for the clay, uttered in undertones,
Our gestures salve for the wind.

We sit out on the earth and stretch our limbs,
Hoarding the little mounds of sorrow laid up in our hearts.

—Charles Wright, closing lines to “Homage to Paul Cézanne,” The Southern Cross: Poems (Random House, 1981)”
― Charles Wright, The Southern Cross