I love poetry, have loved it since I was very young but don't often think these days of living a poem through as I used to, reading each line separately and together, feeling and seeing what comes up from memory in response.
The poem I am sharing today came from my friend Susan who sent it in exchange for one I shared with her yesterday. (Next Tuesday I'll share the poem I sent to her.)
In Blackwater Woods
Look, the trees
are turning
their own bodies
into pillars
of light,
are giving off the rich
fragrance of cinnamon
and fulfillment,
the long tapers
of cattails
are bursting and floating away over
the blue shoulders
of the ponds,
and every pond,
no matter what its name
is, is
nameless now.
Every year
everything
I have ever learned
in my lifetime
leads back to this: the fires
and the black river of loss
whose other side
is salvation,
whose meaning
none of us will ever know.
To live in this world
you must be able
to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it
against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go.
Mary Oliver, from American Primitive
(image below found at Trixi's Stretching)
The poem I am sharing today came from my friend Susan who sent it in exchange for one I shared with her yesterday. (Next Tuesday I'll share the poem I sent to her.)
In Blackwater Woods
Look, the trees
are turning
their own bodies
into pillars
of light,
are giving off the rich
fragrance of cinnamon
and fulfillment,
the long tapers
of cattails
are bursting and floating away over
the blue shoulders
of the ponds,
and every pond,
no matter what its name
is, is
nameless now.
Every year
everything
I have ever learned
in my lifetime
leads back to this: the fires
and the black river of loss
whose other side
is salvation,
whose meaning
none of us will ever know.
To live in this world
you must be able
to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it
against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go.
Mary Oliver, from American Primitive
(image below found at Trixi's Stretching)
1 comment:
This poem resonates with my soul. The image makes a perfect pairing.
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