Couplets of Our Time

If one who seeks nothing will find nothing,
One who finds nothing will yet seek something.

--Indian Proverb

Hear O God, your servant, your self, is one!
(Praised be his name for all its finitude).

--Israelite Call to Worship

Where the cicadas sing in midday heat,
We discuss their reverberating song.

--Inscription on Plato’s tomb

The Great Wall divides paradise from us,
Though the angels wander to glimpse our side.

--Oracle Bone IX.22

The Nile’s defiant flow maintains us,
Our defiant flow, now dead, retains it.

--Book of The Dead (apocryphal)

Bacchus, impostor God, thus posturing,
You reveal the truth of their costuming.

--Motto of the Cult of Dionysus

I made a pilgrimage to poetry,
But hindered on my way, wrote this today.

--Chaucer’s Tale

Do I dare to lift my eyes from the well?
Hold my hands then while I look heavenward.

--The prayer of Baudelaire’s twin