I don't do quagmires.
quote by Donald Rumsfeld
Submitted by Lucian Velea
Vote! | Copy!
Related quotes
Feels The Same
Dark and windy
cold and wet,
our winter isn’t
finished quite yet.
A new year blowin’ in
brings gloomy predictions;
yesterday’s soggy bogs have
become quagmires we must
deal with today.
He will save us, we hope; we pray
we are able to save ourselves.
Ominous weather brews;
no one has any clues
where it’s all really headed.
So hang on and hang tough,
the climate of the economy is
as bleak as the weather outside.
poem by Carolyn Brunelle
Submitted by Poetry Lover
Vote! | Copy!
Quid Pro Quo
PRETEXT
Patriots persevere to
purge the occupying force.
Partisans are betrayed by
pragmatists playing the odds.
Power fluctuates in a
populace fragmented by
plotting and paranoia.
QUOTA
Qualms shadow liberation.
Quorums are hastily fixed.
Quislings quake in forlorn queues.
Quagmires of questions mute them.
Quick justice is dealt in the
quest to salve shattered lives and
quell the acid pain of rage.
poem by Diane Hine
Submitted by Poetry Lover
Vote! | Copy!
An Elegy For Life
O worthless life, Au Revoir!
Upon thy alluring alulas, didst I drift.
Stumbling into treacherous quagmires
How tiring the journey was! how bizarre!
O feyly life, how fickle thou art!
Upon cloud nine, ecstatic one day
Down in the doldrums, remorseful the other.
Queer are thy notions!
Amidst the ordeals and chagrin,
Joyous times are delirious dreams.
And all the phantasmagoria,
Desperate enactment of a pre-written script.
And thus drifts on a worthless life
A ravaged catamaran in an elusive ocean
Tossed asunder by the mighty tides of time
Unto the diabolic mouth of a doomed destiny.
poem by Rohith Ramdas
Submitted by Poetry Lover
Vote! | Copy!
Elephant's Graveyard
So, here it is:
the end of all journies, all that chilly sweat,
of quagmires breached, of tendrils torn and elbowed aside,
glassy centipedes, mosquitoes, sizey as birds,
able to drain small children in one draught,
turbine loud and wingeing with thirst;
Deadly snakes everywhere you step off,
pards clearing their throats, the glowing eyes
of hyenas circling the campfire;
flying foxes, living caprices out some equatorial Goya,
with good, sharp teeth and copious saliva.
Malaria, fever, hunger, diarrhea-
Harkening to hearsay, it being found on no map,
in a language not your own, by a treacherous guide.
All the stuff of legend, rather, even fantasy.
Suddenly,
though never before being there, you recognize it-
a clearing untapped by the fierce midday sun
where it's cool, blue-shadowed, and you hear the chanting of waters
like the heaven of Islam, and straightaway you see-nothing.
The floor sparkles with pinkish diamonds:
All is preternaturally still.
But then...
poem by Morgan Michaels
Submitted by Poetry Lover
Vote! | Copy!
Zeroing In
"I am a landscape," he said.
"a landscape and a person walking in that landscape.
There are daunting cliffs there,
And plains glad in their way
of brown monotony. But especially
there are sinkholes, places
of sudden terror, of small circumference
and malevolent depths."
"I know," she said. "When I set forth
to walk in myself, as it might be
on a fine afternoon, forgetting,
sooner or later I come to where sedge
and clumps of white flowers, rue perhaps,
mark the bogland, and I know
there are quagmires there that can pull you
down, and sink you in bubbling mud."
"We had an old dog," he told her, "when I was a boy,
a good dog, friendly. But there was an injured spot
on his head, if you happened
just to touch it he'd jump up yelping
and bite you. He bit a young child,
they had to take him down to the vet's and destroy him."
"No one knows where it is," she said,
"and even by accident no one touches it.
It's inside my landscape, and only I, making my way
preoccupied through my life, crossing my hills,
sleeping on green moss of my own woods,
I myself without warning touch it,
and leap up at myself -"
"- or flinch back
just in time."
&nbs p; ; "Yes, we learn that.
It's not a terror, it's pain we're talking about:
those places in us, like your dog's bruised head,
that are bruised forever, that time
never assuages, never."
poem by Denise Levertov
Submitted by Poetry Lover
Vote! | Copy!
Meddle
Calmly waking up to a hot pot of coffee
Moments later struggling and screaming “get off me! ”
You never saw it coming
But someone didn’t appreciate the tune you were humming
Or the strings you were strumming
Now your heart beats more than the little boy drumming
You were placed on a list of a suspicious sort
And someone somewhere filed a report
Mentioned to someone on how you planned to contort
The news being spread with the rest of your consort
Showed them blueprints you authored in black and white
You planned to cut society’s fabric like
The dreams of the hobos and the other destitute
Too bad now you don’t sound so resolute
Who you gonna call when your case is to be settled?
......
You know who to trust when you decide not to meddle
-You’re fighting a losing battle but yet and still you march on
Sun is setting on your ideals but all you see is the dawn
You’re one against a system as volcanic as it is cold
Don’t meddle and get out of the road if you wanna grow old
You talked about environment, abortion, political corruption
Quagmires made with weapons of mass destruction
Obstruction of justice carried out through unions
Made pleads on TV while everybody tuned in
And asked them to “try on another man’s shoes”
If they hadn’t any then “try to chant to their blues”
If they had too many then “take a page from their news”
You claimed “there’s always more going on besides you”
But you put your message on during CSI: Super Bowl
Thinking the super flow of audience would be your super gold
You had the planet for a day and you must’ve felt super bold
Should’ve known your real issues were getting super old
And so it goes the ending of your little show
What matters most is just to go with what you’re told
You’ve got a fire that will never temper your mettle
But no one here gives a damn, so why must you meddle?
poem by P.R. Prosper
Submitted by Poetry Lover
Vote! | Copy!
The Song of the Darling River
The skies are brass and the plains are bare,
Death and ruin are everywhere --
And all that is left of the last year's flood
Is a sickly stream on the grey-black mud;
The salt-springs bubble and the quagmires quiver,
And -- this is the dirge of the Darling River:
`I rise in the drought from the Queensland rain,
`I fill my branches again and again;
`I hold my billabongs back in vain,
`For my life and my peoples the South Seas drain;
`And the land grows old and the people never
`Will see the worth of the Darling River.
`I drown dry gullies and lave bare hills,
`I turn drought-ruts into rippling rills --
`I form fair island and glades all green
`Till every bend is a sylvan scene.
`I have watered the barren land ten leagues wide!
`But in vain I have tried, ah! in vain I have tried
`To show the sign of the Great All Giver,
`The Word to a people: O! lock your river.
`I want no blistering barge aground,
`But racing steamers the seasons round;
`I want fair homes on my lonely ways,
`A people's love and a people's praise --
`And rosy children to dive and swim --
`And fair girls' feet in my rippling brim;
`And cool, green forests and gardens ever' --
Oh, this is the hymn of the Darling River.
The sky is brass and the scrub-lands glare,
Death and ruin are everywhere;
Thrown high to bleach, or deep in the mud
The bones lie buried by last year's flood,
And the Demons dance from the Never Never
To laugh at the rise of the Darling River.
poem by Henry Lawson
Submitted by Poetry Lover
Vote! | Copy!
Britannia's Pastorals
Now as an angler melancholy standing
Upon a green bank yielding room for landing,
A wriggling yellow worm thrust on his hook,
Now in the midst he throws, then in a nook:
Here pulls his line, there throws it in again,
Mendeth his cork and bait, but all in vain,
He long stands viewing of the curled stream;
At last a hungry pike, or well-grown bream
Snatch at the worm, and hasting fast away,
He knowing it a fish of stubborn sway,
Pulls up his rod, but soft, as having skill,
Wherewith the hook fast holds the fish's gill;
Then all his line he freely yieldeth him,
Whilst furiously all up and down doth swim
Th' insnared fish, here on the top doth scud,
There underneath the banks, then in the mud,
And with his frantic fits so scares the shoal,
That each one takes his hide, or starting hole:
By this the pike, clean wearied, underneath
A willow lies, and pants (if fishes breathe)
Wherewith the angler gently pulls him to him,
And lest his haste might happen to undo him,
Lays down his rod, then takes his line in hand,
And by degrees getting the fish to land,
Walks to another pool: at length is winner
Of such a dish as serves him for his dinner:
So when the climber half the way had got,
Musing he stood, and busily 'gan plot
How (since the mount did always steeper tend)
He might with steps secure his journey end.
At last (as wand'ring boys to gather nuts)
A hooked pole he from a hazel cuts;
Now throws it here, then there to take some hold,
But bootless and in vain, the rocky mould
Admits no cranny where his hazel hook
Might promise him a step, till in a nook
Somewhat above his reach he hath espied
A little oak, and having often tried
To catch a bough with standing on his toe,
Or leaping up, yet not prevailing so,
He rolls a stone towards the little tree,
Then gets upon it, fastens warily
His pole unto a bough, and at his drawing
The early-rising crow with clam'rous cawing,
Leaving the green bough, flies about the rock,
Whilst twenty twenty couples to him flock:
And now within his reach the thin leaves wave,
With one hand only then he holds his stave,
And with the other grasping first the leaves,
A pretty bough he in his fist receives;
Then to his girdle making fast the hook,
His other hand another bough hath took;
His first, a third, and that, another gives,
To bring him to the place where his root lives.
Then, as a nimble squirrel from the wood,
Ranging the hedges for his filberd-food,
Sits peartly on a bough his brown nuts cracking,
And from the shell the sweet white kernel taking,
Till with their crooks and bags a sort of boys,
To share with him, come with so great a noise,
That he is forc'd to leave a nut nigh broke,
And for his life leap to a neighbour oak,
Thence to a beech, thence to a row of ashes;
Whilst through the quagmires, and red water plashes,
The boys run dabbling thorough thick and thin;
One tears his hose, another breaks his shin,
This, torn and tatter'd, hath with much ado
Got by the briars; and that hath lost his shoe;
This drops his band; that headlong falls for haste;
Another cries behind for being last;
With sticks and stones, and many a sounding holloa,
The little fool, with no small sport, they follow,
Whilst he, from tree to tree, from spray to spray,
Gets to the wood, and hides him in his dray:
Such shift made Riot ere he could get up,
And so from bough to bough he won the top,
Though hindrances, for ever coming there,
Were often thrust upon him by Despair.
poem by William Browne
Submitted by Poetry Lover
Vote! | Copy!