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" Friendship is a sheltering tree "

Coleridge

Happy Equinox!

September 22nd, 2016
autumn-harvest-gary-gay

Autumn Harvest ~ Gary Gay

A couple of poems from Mary Oliver to celebrate the Equinox!

Fall Song

Another year gone, leaving everywhere
its rich spiced residues: vines, leaves,

the uneaten fruits crumbling damply
in the shadows, unmattering back

from the particular island
of this summer, this NOW, that now is nowhere

except underfoot, moldering
in that black subterranean castle

of unobservable mysteries – roots and sealed seeds
and the wanderings of water. This

I try to remember when time’s measure
painfully chafes, for instance when autumn

flares out at the last, boisterous and like us longing
to stay – how everything lives, shifting

from one bright vision to another, forever
in these momentary pastures.

~ Mary Oliver

Spring

Somewhere a black bear

has just risen from sleep

and is staring down the mountain.

All night in the brisk and shallow restlessness of early spring

I think of her, her four black fists flicking the gravel, her tongue

like a red fire touching the grass, the cold water.  There is only one question:

how to love this world.  I think of her rising like a black and leafy ledge

to sharpen her claws against the silence of the trees.  Whatever else

my life is with its poems and its music and its glass cities,

it is also this dazzling darkness coming down the mountain,

breathing and tasting; all day I think of her –

her white teeth, her wordlessness, her perfect love.

~ Mary Oliver

spring_flowers

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