Trees

I think that I shall never see
A poem lovely as a tree.
A tree whose hungry mouth is prest
Against the earth's sweet flowing breast;
A tree that looks at God all day
And lifts her leafy arms to pray;
A tree that may in Summer wear
A nest of robins in her hair;
Upon whose bosom snow has lain;
Who intimately lives with rain.
Poems are made by fools like me,
But only God can make a tree.

~Joyce Kilmer, "Trees," 1914

Places

How hard it is to escape from places. However carefully one goes they hold you - you leave little bits of yourself fluttering on the fences - like rags and shreds of your very life.

~Katherine Mansfield

Sunset

Taken at Clingman's Dome in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park.
Check it out on Google Maps.

Reflections

"We cannot see our reflection in running water. It is only in still water that we can see."

~Taoist proverb

Light

Alas! must it ever be so?
Do we stand in our own light, wherever we go,
And fight our own shadows forever?

~Edward Robert Bulwer Lytton

A piece of the sky

The soft blue sky did never melt
Into his heart; he never felt
The witching of the soft blue sky!

- William Wordsworth, Peter Bell

Serenity

Take me and cast me where you will; I shall still be possessor of the divinity within me, serene and content.

~Marcus Aurelius

Dream on

"What is life? An illusion, a shadow, a story, And the greatest good is little enough: for all life is a dream, and dreams themselves are only dreams."

Pedro Calderon de la Barca

A thing of beauty

A thing of beauty is a joy for ever:
Its loveliness increases; it will never
Pass into nothingness; but still will keep
A bower quiet for us, and a sleep
Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing.
Therefore, on every morrow, are we wreathing
A flowery band to bind us to the earth,
Spite of despondence, of the inhuman dearth
Of noble natures, of the gloomy days,
Of all the unhealthy and o'er-darkened ways
Made for our searching: yes, in spite of all,
Some shape of beauty moves away the pall
From our dark spirits. Such the sun, the moon,
Trees old, and young, sprouting a shady boon
For simple sheep; and such are daffodils
With the green world they live in; and clear rills
That for themselves a cooling covert make
'Gainst the hot season; the mid-forest brake,
Rich with a sprinkling of fair musk-rose blooms:
And such too is the grandeur of the dooms
We have imagined for the mighty dead;
All lovely tales that we have heard or read:
An endless fountain of immortal drink,
Pouring unto us from the heaven's brink.

~John Keats, Endymion

Clouds

Cloud-walls of the morning's gray
Faced with amber column,
Crowned with crimson cupola
From a sunset solemn.
May-mists, for the casements, fetch,
Pale and glimmering,
With a sunbeam hid in each,
And a smell of spring.
~Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Summer

To see the Summer Sky
Is Poetry, though never in a Book it lie -
True Poems flee.
~Emily Dickinson

Little Flower

Little flower -- but if I could understand
What you are, root and all, and all in all,
I should know what God and man is.

~Lord Alfred Tennyson, "Flower in the crannied wall"

Choices

"O poor mortals, how ye make this earth bitter for each other."

~Thomas Carlyle
The French Revolution, vol. I, book II, chapter 1

Little Kingdoms

“Away from the world and its toils and its cares,
I've a snug little kingdom up four pair of stairs.”

-William Makepeace Thackeray