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Sinners Welcome QUOTES

Sinners Welcome QUOTES

1 " In my godless household, poems were the closest we came to sacred speech -- the only prayers said. "

― Mary Karr , Sinners Welcome

2 " The Lesson You've Got

to learn is the someday you'll someday
stagger to, blinking in cold light, all tears
shed, ready to poke your bovine head
in the yoke they've shaped.

Everyone learns this. Born, everyone
breathes, pays tax, plants dead
and hurts galore. There's grief enough
for each. My mother

learned by moving man to man,
outlived them all. The parched earth's
bare (once she leaves it) of any who watched
the instants I trod it.

Other than myself, of course.
I've made a study of bearing
and forbearance. Everyone does,
it turns out, and note

those faces passing by: Not one's a god. "

― Mary Karr , Sinners Welcome

3 " At the Sound of the Gunshot,
Leave A Message

That's what my friend spoke
into his grim machine the winter he first went mad
as we both did in our thirties with still
no hope of revenue, gravely inking
our poems on pages held fast by gyres
the color of lead.

Godless, our minds
did monster us, left us bobbing as in a swamp
until we sank. His eyes were burn holes
in a swollen face. His breath was a venom
he drank deep of. He called his own tongue
a scar, this poet

who can crowbar open
the most sealed heart, make ash flower,
and the cocked shotgun's double-zero mouths
(whose pellets had exploded star holes into plaster and porcelain
and not a few locked doors) never touched
my friend's throat. Praise

Him, whose earth is green.

(for Franz Wright) "

― Mary Karr , Sinners Welcome