Poem Song for Dov Shamir in: Dannie Abse (1963), Dannie Abse, p. 8
“Time to plant tears, says the almanac.
The grandmother sings to the marvelous stove
and the child draws another inscrutable house.”
Source: The Complete Poems 1927-1979
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Elizabeth Bishop 17
American poet 1911–1979Related quotes

From a letter to Robert W. Gordon (February 15, 1926)
Letters

“I am a marvelous housekeeper. Every time I leave a man, I keep his house.”
How to Catch a Man, Keep a Man, and Get Rid of a Man (Doubleday, 1970)

Remembrance Rock (1948), Ch. 2, p. 7
Context: A baby is God's opinion that life should go on. A book that does nothing to you is dead. A baby, whether it does anything to you, represents life. If a bad fire should break out in this house and I had my choice of saving the library or the babies, I would save what is alive. Never will a time come when the most marvelous recent invention is as marvelous as a newborn baby. The finest of our precision watches, the most super-colossal of our supercargo plants, don't compare with a newborn baby in the number and ingenuity of coils and springs, in the flow and change of chemical solutions, in timing devices and interrelated parts that are irreplaceable. A baby is very modern. Yet it is also the oldest of the ancients. A baby doesn't know he is a hoary and venerable antique — but he is. Before man learned how to make an alphabet, how to make a wheel, how to make a fire, he knew how to make a baby — with the great help of woman, and his God and Maker.

“To draw, you must close your eyes and sing”