The truth knocks on the door and you say, go away, I’m looking for the truth, and it goes away. Puzzling.
Go Away
History rarely repeats itself, but its echoes never go away.
The left, liberals, believe that if we just have more gun control laws, all the problems are going to go away. Well, I don’t think so. I don’t think so. I think – yes, it will, it will be reduced. There’s no question about that.
I think poetry always lives its life, and people come to it and people go away from it, ‘people’ in the sense of larger numbers of people. It’s as though you begin to think that poetry is a resource, and that at certain times people seem to need it or want it or can find sustenance in it, and at other times they can’t.
Whenever something went wrong when I was young – if I had a pimple or if my hair broke – my mom would say, ‘Sister mine, I’m going to make you some soup.’ And I really thought the soup would make my pimple go away or my hair stronger.
The physicians of one class feel the patients and go away, merely prescribing medicine. As they leave the room they simply ask the patient to take the medicine. They are the poorest class of physicians.
It is a puzzling thing. The truth knocks on the door and you say, ‘Go away, I’m looking for the truth,’ and so it goes away. Puzzling.
Questions that have no right to go away are those that have to do with the person we are about to become; they are conversations that will happen with or without our conscious participation.
Poetry is a phantom script telling how rainbows are made and why they go away.