97 Quotes by Tracy K. Smith

I am alive in 21st Century America. I have a voice. Let it serve as a corrective to the violent and reckless power that stands against the force of love.

These and other tools help poems call our attention to moments when the ordinary nature of experience changes--when the things we think we know flare into brighter colors, starker contrasts, strange and intoxicating possibilities.

There are ways of entering the dream / The way a painter enters a studio: / To spill.

Sometimes telling what happened, in whatever way you can, is a means of lightening your burden. It summons others to help you bear the weight of your own story, so that you might finally get out from under it.

There is not a day in my life during which I have not looked at my Black children and worried. There is not a day in my life when I have not made actual prayers on their behalf. Simple prayers for their safety. Simple prayers for their survival.

And then I think, maybe that’s what we are. An accidental spectacle.

Is this some enigmatic type of test? What if weFail? How and to whom do we address our appeal?

I am you, one day out of five, Tired, empty, hating what I carry But afraid to lay it down, stingy, Angry, doing violence to others By the sheer freight of my gloom, Halfway home, wanting to stop, to quitBut keeping going mostly out of spite.

She's like an islandMade of rock, with one lone tree at the topOf the only mountain. She's like the soleIncongruous goat tethered to the tree,Smiling almost as you approach, scrapingThe ground with its horns, and then--Lickety split--lurching hard, daringThe rope to snap.