"OK. I mean when you think about language and you think about consciousness, it’s just incredible to think that we can make any sounds that can reach over across to each other at all. Because I mean I think we’re — I think the beauty of being human is that we are incredibly, intimately near each other, we know about each other, but yet we do not know or never can know what it’s like inside another person.

And it’s amazing, here am I sitting in front of you now, looking at your face, you’re looking at mine, and yet neither of us have ever seen our own faces, and that in some way, thought is the face that we put on the meaning that we feel and that we struggle with, and that the world is always larger and more intense and stranger than our best thought will ever reach. And that’s the mystery of poetry. Poetry tries to draw alongside the mystery as it’s emerging and somehow bring it into presence and into birth."

John O'Donohue