Mary Oliver....

[lasher]

I'd like to post one of Mary Oliver's poems...I hope you enjoy her as much as I do...

Of Goodness

How good
that the clouds travel, as they do,
like the long dresses of the angels
of our imagination,

or gather in storm masses, then break
with their gifts of replenishment,
and how good
that the trees shelter the patient birds

in their thick leaves,
and how good that in the field
the next morning
red bird frolics again, his throat full of song,

and how good
that the dark ponds, refreshed,
are holding the white cups of the lilies
so that each is an eye that can look upward,

and how good that the blue-winged teal
comes paddling among them, as cheerful as ever,

and so on, and so on.....

[lasher]

I find her outlook on life through nature refreshing and insightful. :approve:
Here is another poem from Mary Oliver called Summer Story.

Summer Story

When the hummingbird
sinks its face
into the trumpet vine,
into the funnels

of the blossoms,
and the tongue
leaps out
and throbs,

I am scorched
to realize once again
how many small, available things
are in this world

that aren't
pieces of gold
or power -
that nobody owns

or could buy even
for a hillside of money -
that just
float about the world,

or drift over the fields,
or into the gardens,
and into the tents of the vines,
and now here I am

spending my time,
as the saying goes,
watching until the watching turns into feeling,
so that I feel I am myself

a small bird
with a terrible hunger,
with a thin beak probing and dipping
and a heart that races so fast

it is only a heartbeat away from breaking -
and I am the hunger and the assuagement,
and also I am the leaves and the blossoms,
and, like them, I am full of delight, and shaking.

[ctivnan]

:thanks: for sharing such refreshing poems!

While reading her, I feel more appreciation to the world around me. Life is still beautiful! :yey:

[lasher]

Mary Oliver is known for spending hours (literally) silent and still observing the natural surroundings and nature, and then writing about them - and it shows, I think. She applies the same painstaking process to finding that perfect word which makes her poems so descriptive and visual...... Here is her Egrets....

Egrets

Where the path closed
down and over,
through the scumbled leaves,
fallen branches,
through the knotted catbrier,
I kept going. Finally
I could not
save my arms
from the thorns; soon
the mosquitoes
smelled me, hot
and wounded, and came
wheeling and whining.
And that’s how I came
to the edge of the pond:
black and empty
except for a spindle
of bleached reeds
at the far shore
which, as I looked,
wrinkled suddenly
into three egrets –
a shower
of white fire!
Even half-asleep they had
such faith in the world
that had made them –
tilting through the water,
unruffled, sure,
by the laws
of their faith not logic
they opened their wings
softly and stepped
over every dark thing.

[lasher]

I am not familiar with the winters in your bright and green paradise across my continent and the Pacific expanse (so far away, yet a mere mouse-click apart). I don’t know if you’ve enjoyed the splendor of snowfall, watching as it blankets a golden field or dusts the trees like powdered sugar – whether you have or haven’t, please enjoy Mary’s “First Snow”.

First Snow

The snow
began here
this morning and all day
continued, its white
rhetoric everywhere
calling us back to why, how,
whence such beauty and what
the meaning; such
an oracular fever! Flowing
past windows, an energy it seemed
would never ebb, never settle
less than lovely! And only now,
deep into the night,
it has finally ended.
The silence
is immense,
and the heavens still hold
a million candles; nowhere
the familiar things:
stars, the moon,
the darkness we expect
and nightly turn from. Trees
glitter like castles
of ribbon, the broad fields
smolder with light, a passing
creek bed lies
heaped with shining hills;
and though the questions
that have assailed us all day
remain – not a single
answer has been found –
walking out now
into the silence and the light
under the trees,
and through the fields,
feels like one.

[lasher]

Another by Ms. Oliver...... :)

University Hospital, Boston

The trees on the hospital lawn
are lush and thriving. They too
are getting the best of care,
like you, and the anonymous many,
in the clean rooms high above this city,
where day and night the doctors keep
arriving, where intricate machines
chart with cool devotion
the murmur of the blood,
the slow patching up of bone,
the despair of the mind.

When I come to visit and we walk out
into the light of a summer day,
we sit under the trees –
buckeyes, a sycamore and one
black walnut brooding
high over a hedge of lilacs
as old as the red brick building
behind them, the original
hospital built before the Civil War.
We sit on the lawn together, holding hands
while you tell me: you are better.

How many young men, I wonder,
came here, wheeled on cots off the slow trains
from the red and hideous battlefields
to lie all summer in the small and stuffy chambers
while doctors did what they could, longing
for tools still unimagined, medicines still unfound,
wisdoms still unguessed at, and how many died
staring at the leaves of the trees, blind
to the terrible effort around them to keep them alive?
I look into your eyes

which are sometimes green and sometimes gray,
and sometimes full of humor, but often not,
and tell myself, you are better,
because my life without you would be
a place of parched and broken trees.
Later, walking the corridors down to the street,
I turn and step inside an empty room.
Yesterday someone was here with a gasping face.
Now the bed is made all new,
the machine have been rolled away. The silence
continues, deep and neutral,
as I stand here loving you.

[lasher]

And yet another by Oliver. I like the detail she writes into her poems, it's almost like I'm there.....

Ghosts

1

Have you noticed?

2

Where so many millions of powerful brawling beasts
lay down on the earth and died
it’s hard to tell now
what’s bone, and what merely
was once.

The golden eagle, for instance,
has a bit of heaviness in him;
moreover the huge barns
seem ready, sometimes, to ramble off
toward deeper grass,

3

1805
near the Bitterroot Mountains:
a man named Lewis kneels down
on the prairies watching

a sparrow’s nest cleverly concealed in the wild hyssop
and lined with buffalo hair. The chicks,
not more than a day hatched, lean
quietly into the thick wool as if
content, after all,
to have left the perfect world and fallen,
helpless and blind
into the flowered fields and the perils
of this one.

4

In the book of the earth it is written:
nothing can die.

In the book of the Sioux it is written:
they have gone away into the earth to hide.
Nothing will coax them out again
but the people dancing.

5

Said the old-timers:
the tongue
is the sweetest meat.

Passengers shooting from train windows
could hardly miss, they were
that many.

Afterward the carcasses
stank unbelievably, and sang with flies, ribboned
with slopes of white fat,
black ropes of blood – hellhunks
in the prairie heat.

6

Have you noticed? How the rain
falls soft as the fall
of moccasins. Have you noticed?
how the immense circles still,
stubbornly, after a hundred years,
mark the grass where the rich droppings
from the roaring bulls
fell to the earth as the herd stood
day after day, moon after moon
in their tribal circle, out waiting
the packs of yellow-eyed wolves that are also
have you noticed? gone now.

7

Once only, and then in a dream,
I watched while, secretly
and with the tenderness of any caring woman,
a cow gave birth
to a red calf, tongued him dry and nursed him
in a warm corner
of the clear night
in the fragrant grass
in the wild domains
of the prairie spring, and I asked them,
in my dreams I knelt down and asked them
to make room for me.

[lasher]

Blossom

In April
the ponds
open
like black blossoms,
the moon
swims in every one;
there’s fire
everywhere: frogs shouting
their desire,
their satisfaction. What
we know: that time
chops at us all like an iron
hoe, that death
is a state of paralysis. What
we long for: joy
before death, nights
in the swale – everywhere else
can wait but not
this thrust
from the root
of the body. What
we know: we are
more than blood – we are more
than our hunger and yet
we belong
to the moon and when the ponds
open, when the burning
begins the most
thoughtful among us dreams
of hurrying down
into the black petals,
into the fire,
into the night where time lies shattered,
into the body of another.

[ctivnan]

We don't experience snow here but this poem is so engaging and vivid that I can feel there's snow just outside my window.

Now, we are going towards the months of summer, which means hotter months (temperatures range from: 28 - 33 degrees Celsius or even hotter!) :flame: :flame: :flame:
I've experienced snow in another country and now I look back and realize how wonderful it had been in spite of the bitter cold.

:thanks: for sharing this one, Lasher!

I am not familiar with the winters in your bright and green paradise across my continent and the Pacific expanse (so far away, yet a mere mouse-click apart). I don’t know if you’ve enjoyed the splendor of snowfall, watching as it blankets a golden field or dusts the trees like powdered sugar – whether you have or haven’t, please enjoy Mary’s “First Snow”.

First Snow

The snow
began here
this morning and all day
continued, its white
rhetoric everywhere
calling us back to why, how,
whence such beauty and what
the meaning; such
an oracular fever! Flowing
past windows, an energy it seemed
would never ebb, never settle
less than lovely! And only now,
deep into the night,
it has finally ended.
The silence
is immense,
and the heavens still hold
a million candles; nowhere
the familiar things:
stars, the moon,
the darkness we expect
and nightly turn from. Trees
glitter like castles
of ribbon, the broad fields
smolder with light, a passing
creek bed lies
heaped with shining hills;
and though the questions
that have assailed us all day
remain – not a single
answer has been found –
walking out now
into the silence and the light
under the trees,
and through the fields,
feels like one.

[lasher]

Hey now, :hey:

You're :welcome:

I'm glad you are enjoying her writing. The energy of her writing comes from concrete images she observes in nature and her life's experience, I do not remember reading a poem of hers that played with syntax - everything is smooth and flowing, as is nature.... :happy0088:

Morning at Great Pond

It starts like this:
forks of light
slicking up
out of the east,
flying over you,
and under what’s left of night –
its black waterfalls,
its craven doubt –
dissolves like gravel
as the sun appears
trailing clouds
of pink and green wool,
igniting the fields,
turning the ponds
to plates of fire.
The creatures there
are dark flickerings
you make out
one by one
as the light lifts –
great blue herons,
wood ducks shaking
their shimmering crests –
and knee-deep
in the purple shallows
a deer drinking:
as she turns
the silver water
crushes like silk,
shaking the sky,
and you’re healed then
from the night, your heart
wants more, you’re ready
to rise and look!
to hurry anywhere!
to believe in everything.

[lasher]

And Mary's quick take on rain.....

Rain In Ohio

The robin cries: rain!
The crow cries: plunder!

The blakesnake climbing
in the vines halts
his long ladder of muscle

while the thunderheads whirl up
out of the white west,

their dark hooves nicking
the tall trees as they come.

Rain, rain, rain! Sings the robin
frantically, then flies for cover.

The crow hunches.
The blacksnake

pours himself swift and heavy
into the ground.

[lasher]

"Something" is a little darker than Mary usually writes, but it is worth the thought.... Please to enjoy.......

Something
1

Somebody skulking in the yard
stumbles against a stone, it stutters
across the dark boards of the night
and we know. We know
he’s there. We kiss

anyway. This
is not a pleasant story.

2

And time loops like the woodbine
up into the branches
of new seasons, and two towns away
a man who can no longer bear his life
takes it, alone, in the thick woods.

The police know.
And we know – since no one tramples again
the grass outside our window –
he is our lonely brother,
our audience,
our vine-wrapped spirit of the forest who
grinned all night.

3

Now you are dead too, and I, no longer young,
know what a kiss is worth. Time
has made his pitch, the slow
speech that goes on and on,
reasonable and bloodless. Yet over
the bed of each of us moonlight
throws down her long hair until

one must have something.
Anything. This
or that, or something else:
the dark wound
of watching.

[lasher]

Back to nature folks..... Mary's White Night....

White Night

All night
I float
in the shallow ponds
while the moon wanders
burning,
bone white,
among the milky stems.
Once
I saw her hand reach
to touch the muskrat’s
small sleek head
and it was lovely, oh,
I don’t want to argue anymore
about all the things
I thought I could not
live without! Soon
the muskrat
will glide with another
into their castle
of weeds, morning
will rise from the east
tangled and brazen,
and before that
difficult
and beautiful
hurricane of light
I want to flow out
across the mother
of all waters,
I want to lose myself
on the black and silky currents,
yawning,
gathering
the tall lilies
of sleep.