Poems that I love

by Mary Oliver What did you notice? The dew snail; the low-flying sparrow; the bat, on the wind, in the dark; big-chested geese, in the V of sleekest performance; the soft toad, patient in the hot sand; the sweet-hungry ants; the uproar of mice in the empty house; the tin music of the cricket’s body; the blouse of the goldenrod. What did you hear? The thrush greeting the morning; the little bluebirds in their hot box; the salty talk of the wren, then the deep cup of the hour of silence. What did you admire? The oaks, letting down their dark and hairy fruit; the carrot, rising in its elongated waist; the onion, sheet after sheet, curved inward to the pale green wand; at the end of summer the brassy dust, the almost liquid beauty of the flowers; then the ferns, scrawned black by the frost. What astonished you? The swallows making their dip and turn over the water. What would you like to see again? My dog: her energy and exuberance, her willingness,

by Mary Oliver You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves. Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine. Meanwhile the world goes on. Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain are moving across the landscapes, over the prairies and the deep trees, the mountains and the rivers. Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air, are heading home again. Whoever you are, no matter how lonely, the world offers itself to your imagination, calls you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting - over and over announcing your place in the family of things. from Dream Work , 1985 If you want to read more of Mary Oliver’s poems, here are some that I like.

Even grandma goes out drinking-- moonlit night -Issa

by Troy Jollimore 1. Where what I see comes to rest, at the edge of the lake, against what I think I see and, up on the bank, who I am maintains an uneasy truce with who I fear I am, while in the cabin’s shade the gap between the words I said and those I remember saying is just wide enough to contain the remains that remain of what I assumed I knew. 2. Out in the canoe, the person I thought you were gingerly trades spots with the person you are and what I believe I believe sits uncomfortably next to what I believe. When I promised I will always give you what I want you to want, you heard, or desired to hear, something else. As, over and in the lake, the cormorant and its image traced paths through the sky. From: The NewYorker July 27, 2009

Simplify. Clarify. Vivify. Surprise your eyes. Break your heart open. Dose all your ills with laughter. Look out! Here comes the Imperishable Light! Accept no substitutes. We are all participants in the marvelous. ~ James Broughton  

by R S Thomas Summer is here. Once more the house has its Spray of martins, Prousts fountain Of small birds, whose light shadows Come and go in the sunshine Of the lawn as thoughts do In the mind. Watching them fly Is my business, not as a man vowed To science, who counts their returns To the rafters, or sifts their droppings For facts, recording the wave-length Of their screaming; my method is so To have them about myself Through the hours of this brief Season and to fill with their Movement, that it is I that they build In and bring up their young To return to after the bitter Migrations, knowing the site Inviolate through its outward changes.

By Lucia Perillo Of all the birds, they are the ones who mind their being armless most: witness how, when they walk, their heads jerk back and forth like rifle bolts. How they heave their shoulders into each stride as if they hoped that by some chance new bones there would come popping out with a boxing glove on the end of each. Little Elvises, the hairdo slicked with too much grease, they convene on my lawn to strategize for their class-action suit. Flight they would trade in a New York minute for a black muscle car and a fist on the shift at any stale green light. But here in my yard by the Jack-in-the-Box Dumpster they can only fossick* in the grass for remnants of the world’s stale buns. And this despite all the crow poems that have been written because men like to see themselves as crows (the head-jerk performed in the rearview mirror, the dark brow commanding the rainy weather). So I think I know how they must feel: ripped off, shook down, taken to the c