Poetry Thursday

Is it wrong to use the same poet again??

I wrote last week that I have only just discovered Mary Oliver for the very first time. How could I have missed her in all of the volumes of poetry I was asked to study? How could I have missed her in all of the inspirational books and websites I have visited? I know now I must have read her name before, but somehow I missed the poetry - the way that you sometimes miss seeing things until you are looking for them. Like how you have never heard of a celebrity and after you notice them for the first time you see references to them everywhere. Well, I have enjoyed my week of meeting Mary Oliver and so whether I am allowed or not, I am going to use another of her poems - TWO actually - because they are what has made me gasp this week. When I re-read them now I realize that they both have references to wildness - as many of Oliver's poems do. I guess my choices could have something to do with the echoes of my cackle and the Grroooooowwwwwllll I've been making lately! heh heh heh. I just LOVE her!

I will really try to post someone else next week!

A Meeting

She steps into the dark swamp
where the long wait ends.

The secret slippery package
drops to the weeds.

She leans her long neck and tongues it
between breaths slack with exhaustion

and after a while it rises and becomes a creature
like her, but much smaller.

So now there are two. And they walk together
like a dream under the trees.

In early June, at the edge of a field
thick with pink and yellow flowers

I meet them.
I can only stare.

She is the most beautiful woman
I have ever seen.

Her child leaps among the flowers,
the blue of the sky falls over me

like silk, the flowers burn, and I want
to live my life all over again, to begin again,

to be utterly
wild.

-Mary Oliver

The Summer Day

Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean--
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down--
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
With your one wild and precious life?
-Mary Oliver

P.S. Sunday Scribblings is READY! (mostly - there are still some technical difficulties to be worked out.) But if you go there you'll be able to sign up!!!