Sympathy Quotes

LET other heroes boast their scars,
The marks of sturt and strife:
And other poets sing of wars,
The plagues of human life:
Shame fa’ the fun, with sword and gun
To slap mankind like lumber!
I sing his name, and nobler fame,
What multiplies our number.

Great Nature spoke, with air benign,
“Go on, ye human race;
This lower world I you resign;
Be fruitful and increase.
The liquid fire of strong desire
I’ve poured it in each bosom;
Here, on this had, does Mankind stand,
And there is Beauty’s blossom.”

The Hero of these artless strains,
A lowly bard was he,
Who sung his rhymes in Coila’s plains,
With meikle mirth an’glee;
Kind Nature’s care had given his share
Large, of the flaming current;
And, all devout, he never sought
To stem the sacred torrent.

He felt the powerful, high behest
Thrill, vital, thro’ and thro’;
And sought a correspondent breast,
To give obedience due:
Propitious Powers screened the young flowers,
From mildews of abortion;
And low! the bard—a great reward—
Has got a double portion!

Auld cantie Coil may count the day,
As annual it returns,
The third of Libra’s equal sway,
That gave another Burns,
With future rhymes, an’ other times,
To emulate his sire:
To sing auld Coil in nobler style
With more poetic fire.

Ye Powers of peace, and peaceful song,
Look down with gracious eyes;
And bless auld Coila, large and long,
With multiplying joys;
Lang may she stand to prop the land,
The flower of ancient nations;
And Burnses spring, her fame to sing,
To endless generations!

(Poem by Robert Burns)

I

Everyone has their own peculiar price,
not quantifiable in currency.
When my hypodermic grazed your vein,
you confessed yours.
It was not exorbitant
so I withheld the serum
a moment longer before
pushing the plunger.

II

You saw rattlesnakes mate in the arroyo
tangled like hoses, braided
like black ropes for a day,
utterly vulnerable in the grip
of love or instinct.

Indians say this sight
grants second sight.

You saw your victimhood
cupped like a cross of iron
in the hollow above your sternum,
cold, rusted from fear,
dangling from a chain
of misinterpreted
coincidence.

Self-knowledge
is a dangerous thing
and can’t be granted
by a single vision.

III

Spoke a prophet with his head on a platter:

“To stand for something,
to protest abortion or the destruction of wetlands,
to remember the Holocaust or the Alamo,
to disagree with farm subsidies
or campaign against clear-cutting
helps focus minds dulled by tolerance,
not a virtue but a courtesy–
like ignoring someone’s body odor
in an elevator– which makes it
perfectly moral to say,

‘I understand and accept what you are doing
though I find it utterly abhorrent.’

Blessed are those who have found their cause:
gun ownership, preservation of historic buildings,
the fight against leukemia or for hemp:
whatever we are righteously incensed about
restores our passion for goodness,
however misguided.”

Beneath the empty platter
the world moves
like ancient women
gathering fuel in vacant lots.

IV

The gut-ache of youth,
super-caffeinated though
socially melancholy, is beyond
the generation previous,
confirmed by body-piercing,
black leather and ghostly skin
as if in preparation, not for a prom
but for a funeral.

You must have cancer of the throat
to sing for them.
Pain sustains them.

Blessed are the pure,
if only driven by glands.

V

Seeking the river’s calm
you stretched before the television,
dreaming of a Winnebago
and Palm Springs,
when suddenly you heard:

My sheep hear my voice and my voice is on TV.

Was the sound inside or outside your head?

No televangelist with cockatoo hair
came to explain, so you wept like a sinner,
fearing you were the Christ,
everyone was their own Christ,
and this was too much for you
so I injected the antidote
out of pity for all the lies
you need to make life tolerable.

(Poem by Craig Erick Chaffin)

Abortions will not let you forget.
You remember the children you got that you did not get,
The damp small pulps with a little or with no hair,
The singers and workers that never handled the air.
You will never neglect or beat
Them, or silence or buy with a sweet.
You will never wind up the sucking-thumb
Or scuttle off ghosts that come.
You will never leave them, controlling your luscious sigh,
Return for a snack of them, with gobbling mother-eye.

I have heard in the voices of the wind the voices of my dim killed
children.
I have contracted. I have eased
My dim dears at the breasts they could never suck.
I have said, Sweets, if I sinned, if I seized
Your luck
And your lives from your unfinished reach,
If I stole your births and your names,
Your straight baby tears and your games,
Your stilted or lovely loves, your tumults, your marriages, aches,
and your deaths,
If I poisoned the beginnings of your breaths,
Believe that even in my deliberateness I was not deliberate.
Though why should I whine,
Whine that the crime was other than mine?–
Since anyhow you are dead.
Or rather, or instead,
You were never made.
But that too, I am afraid,
Is faulty: oh, what shall I say, how is the truth to be said?
You were born, you had body, you died.
It is just that you never giggled or planned or cried.

Believe me, I loved you all.
Believe me, I knew you, though faintly, and I loved, I loved you
All.

(Poem by Gwendolyn Brooks)

We decided to have the abortion, became
killers together. The period that came
changed nothing. They were dead, that young couple
who had been for life.
As we talked of it in bed, the crash
was not a surprise. We went to the window,
looked at the crushed cars and the gleaming
curved shears of glass as if we had
done it. Cops pulled the bodies out
Bloody as births from the small, smoking
aperture of the door, laid them
on the hill, covered them with blankets that soaked
through. Blood
began to pour
down my legs into my slippers. I stood
where I was until they shot the bound
form into the black hole
of the ambulance and stood the other one
up, a bandage covering its head,
stained where the eyes had been.
The next morning I had to kneel
an hour on that floor, to clean up my blood,
rubbing with wet cloths at those glittering
translucent spots, as one has to soak
a long time to deglaze the pan
when the feast is over.

(Poem by Sharon Olds)

To be able to see every side of every question;
To be on every side, to be everything, to be nothing long;
To pervert truth, to ride it for a purpose,
To use great feelings and passions of the human family
For base designs, for cunning ends,
To wear a mask like the Greek actors –
Your eight-page paper — behind which you huddle,
Bawling through the megaphone of big type:
“This is I, the giant.”
Thereby also living the life of a sneak-thief,
Poisoned with the anonymous words
Of your clandestine soul.
To scratch dirt over scandal for money,
And exhume it to the winds for revenge,
Or to sell papers,
Crushing reputations, or bodies, if need be,
To win at any cost, save your own life.
To glory in demoniac power, ditching civilization,
As a paranoiac boy puts a log on the track
And derails the express train.
To be an editor, as I was.
Then to lie here close by the river over the place
Where the sewage flows from the village,
And the empty cans and garbage are dumped,
And abortions are hidden.

(Poem by Edgar Lee Masters)

Some carol of the banjo, to its measure keeping time;
Of viol or of lute some make a song.
My battered old accordion, you’re worthy of a rhyme,
You’ve been my friend and comforter so long.
Round half the world I’ve trotted you, a dozen years or more;
You’ve given heaps of people lots of fun;
You’ve set a host of happy feet a-tapping on the floor . . .
Alas! your dancing days are nearly done.

I’ve played you from the palm-belt to the suburbs of the Pole;
From the silver-tipped sierras to the sea.
The gay and gilded cabin and the grimy glory-hole
Have echoed to your impish melody.
I’ve hushed you in the dug-out when the trench was stiff with dead;
I’ve lulled you by the coral-laced lagoon;
I’ve packed you on a camel from the dung-fire on the bled,
To the hell-for-breakfast Mountains of the Moon.

I’ve ground you to the shanty men, a-whooping heel and toe,
And the hula-hula graces in the glade.
I’ve swung you in the igloo to the lousy Esquimau,
And the Haussa at a hundred in the shade.
The Nigger on the levee, and the Dinka by the Nile
have shuffled to your insolent appeal.
I’ve rocked with glee the chimpanzee, and mocked the crocodile,
And shocked the pompous penquin and the seal.

I’ve set the yokels singing in a little Surrey pub,
Apaches swinging in a Belville bar.
I’ve played an obligato to the tom-tom’s rub-a-dub,
And the throb of Andalusian guitar.
From the Horn to Honolulu, from the Cape to Kalamazoo,
From Wick to Wicklow, Samarkand to Spain,
You’ve roughed it with my kilt-bag like a comrade tried and true. . . .
Old pal! We’ll never hit the trail again.

Oh I know you’re cheap and vulgar, you’re an instrumental crime.
In drawing-rooms you haven’t got a show.
You’re a musical abortion, you’re the voice of grit and grime,
You’re the spokesman of the lowly and the low.
You’re a democratic devil, you’re the darling of the mob;
You’re a wheezy, breezy blasted bit of glee.
You’re the headache of the high-bow, you’re the horror of the snob,
but you’re worth your weight in ruddy gold to me.

For you’ve chided me in weakness and you’ve cheered me in defeat;
You’ve been an anodyne in hours of pain;
And when the slugging jolts of life have jarred me off my feet,
You’ve ragged me back into the ring again.
I’ll never go to Heaven, for I know I am not fit,
The golden harps of harmony to swell;
But with asbestos bellows, if the devil will permit,
I’ll swing you to the fork-tailed imps of Hell.

Yes, I’ll hank you, and I’ll spank you,
And I’ll everlasting yank you
To the cinder-swinging satellites of Hell.

(Poem by Robert William Service)