Leilani Barnett

“Nothing in the cry
of cicadas suggests they
are about to die”
― Matsuo Bashō

“Even in Kyoto/Hearing the cuckoo's cry/I long for Kyoto”
― Basho Matsuo

“THAT crazed girl improvising her music.
Her poetry, dancing upon the shore,

Her soul in division from itself
Climbing, falling She knew not where,
Hiding amid the cargo of a steamship,
Her knee-cap broken, that girl I declare
A beautiful lofty thing, or a thing
Heroically lost, heroically found.

No matter what disaster occurred
She stood in desperate music wound,
Wound, wound, and she made in her triumph
Where the bales and the baskets lay
No common intelligible sound
But sang, 'O sea-starved, hungry sea”
― William Butler Yeats, The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats

“Any fool can fight a winning battle, but it needs character to fight a losing one, and that should inspire us; which reminds me that I dreamed the other night that I was being hanged, but was the life and soul of the party.”
― William Butler Yeats