Douglas Dunn Quotes

13 Sourced Quotes

Heavy rain everywhere washes up the bones of British.
Where did all that power come from, the wish
To be inert, but rich and strong, to have too much?

Douglas Dunn
Snow is its own country, and it beckons
With its white finger crooked, and is calling
From the hush of its chilled bulk, its tons
And territories, its white ground falling.

Douglas Dunn
Day by nomadic day Our anniversaries go by,
Dates anchored in an inner sky,
To utmost ground, interior clay.

Douglas Dunn
Ours was a gentle generation, pacific,
In love with music, art and restaurants,
And he with she, strolling among the canvases,
And she with him, at concerts, coats on laps.
Almost all of us were shy when we were young.

Douglas Dunn
Politics soften everything.
Truth is known only to its victims.
All else is photographs – a documentary
The starving and the playboys perish in.
Life disguises itself with professionalism.

Douglas Dunn
As well as between tongue and teeth, poetry happens between the ears and behind the left nipple.

Douglas Dunn
I am light with meditation, religiose
And mystic with a day of solitude.

Douglas Dunn
Bored narcissists, for whom friendship is an ache,
Look for themselves in bus-queues and railway stations.

Douglas Dunn
God so loved the world
He puked every time he looked at it,
With a few miraculous exceptions. He's gone now.

Douglas Dunn
They ruined us. They conquered continents.
We filled their uniforms. We cruised the seas.
We worked their mines and made their histories.
You work, we rule, they said. We worked; they ruled.
They fooled the tenements. All men were fooled.

Douglas Dunn
Film is just a reflection
Of the matchless despair of the century.
There have been twenty centuries since charity began.
Indignation is day-to-day stuff; It keeps us off the streets, it keeps us watching.

Douglas Dunn
And I must mourn
Until Equator crawls to Capricorn
Or murder in the sun melts down
The Arctic and Antarctica.

Douglas Dunn
My poems should be Clyde-built, crude and sure,
With images of those dole-deployed
To honour the indomitable Reds,
Clydesiders of slant steel and angled cranes;
A poetry of nuts and bolts, born, bred,
Embattled by the Clyde, tight and impure.

Douglas Dunn