Date: September, 1934

"When the mind is dark with the multiple shadows of facts, / There is no heat of the sun can warm the mind."

— Miles, Josephine (1911-1985)

Date: September, 1934

"This weight of knowledge dark on the brain is never / To be burnt out like fever, // But will slowly, with speech to tell the way and ease it, / Will sink into the blood, and warm, and slowly / Move in the veins, and murmur, and come at length / To the tongue's tip and the finger's tip most lowl...

— Miles, Josephine (1911-1985)

Date: w. 1936, 1938

"The year plunges into night / and the heart plunges / lower than night // to an empty, windswept place / without sun, stars or moon / but a peculiar light as of thought // that spins a dark fire-- / whirling upon itself until, / in the cold, it kindles // to make a man aware of nothing / that he...

— Williams, William Carlos (1883-1963)

Date: 1946

"his brain appears, throned in "fantastic triumph," / and shines through his hat / with jeweled works at work at intermeshing crowns, / lamé with lights."

— Bishop, Elizabeth (1911-1979)

Date: 1955, 1958

"It will be dark out there / with the Salvation Army Band. / And the mind its own illumination."

— Ferlinghetti, Lawrence. (b. 1919)

Date: 1990

"The noise the body makes / when the body meets / the soul over the soul's ocean and penumbra / is the old sound of up-and-down, in-and-out, / a lump of muscle chug-chugging blood / into the ear; a lover's / heart-shaped tongue; / flesh rocking flesh until flesh comes; / the butcher working / at ...

— Lee, Li-Young (b .1957)

Date: 2001

"in you the in moon / its rays entwined in my mind's / hair hangs down right in"

— Hollo, Anselm (b. 1934)

Date: 2007

"When a human embryo is seven weeks old, / the brain shines through its forehead, a cloud / of light, belly-deep and breathing, / the whole, luminous mass cabled and alone."

— Witt, Sam (b. 1970)

Date: February 1, 2010

"Burn the body down / And, with it, out goes the pilot / Blue light of the mind."

— Cruz, Cynthia

Date: 2010

"A thought to mind, so to the string / plucked, or touched, or bowed, the music is, / a wrinkling of the air as immaterial / and brief as sunlight glancing on a wave."

— Le Guin, Ursula (b. 1929)