Morning Poem by Mary Oliver

Every morning

the world

is created.

Under the orange

sticks of the sun

the heaped

ashes of the night

turn into leaves again

and fasten themselves to the high branches ---

and the ponds appear

like black cloth

on which are painted islands

of summer lilies.

If it is your nature

to be happy

you will swim away along the soft trails

for hours, your imagination

alighting everywhere.

And if your spirit

carries within it

the thorn

that is heavier than lead ---

if it's all you can do

to keep on trudging ---

there is still

somewhere deep within you

a beast shouting that the earth

is exactly what it wanted ---

each pond with its blazing lilies

is a prayer heard and answered

lavishly,

every morning,

whether or not

you have ever dared to be happy,

whether or not

you have ever dared to pray.

NOTE: Poet Mary Oliver  (b.1935) is an “indefatigable guide to the natural world,” wrote Maxine Kumin in the Women’s Review of Books,“particularly to its lesser-known aspects.” Oliver’s verse focuses on the quiet of occurrences of nature: industrious hummingbirds, egrets, motionless ponds, “lean owls / hunkering with their lamp-eyes.”  She sought to understand the wonder and pain of nature.  

“After Disappointment” by Mark Jarman

To lie in your child’s bed when she is gone 

Is calming as anything I know. To fall 

Asleep, her books arranged above your head, 

Is to admit that you have never been

So tired, so enchanted by the spell 

Of your grown body. To feel small instead 

Of blocking out the light, to feel alone, 

Not knowing what you should or shouldn’t feel, 

Is to find out, no matter what you’ve said 

About the cramped escapes and obstacles 

You plan and face and have to call the world, 

That there remain these places, occupied 

By children, yours if lucky, like the girl 

Who finds you here and lies down by your side.

“Interesting Times” by Mark Jarman

Everything’s happening on the cusp of tragedy, the tip of comedy, the pivot of event.

You want a placid life, find another planet. This one is occupied with the story’s arc:

About to happen, on the verge, horizontal. You want another planet, try the moon.

Try any of the eight, try Planet X. It’s out there somewhere, black with serenity.

How interesting will our times become? How much more interesting can they become?

A crow with something dangling from its beak flaps onto a telephone pole top, daintily,

And croaks its victory to other crows and tries to keep its morsel to itself.

A limp shape, leggy, stunned, drops from the black beak’s scissors like a rag.

We drive past, commenting, and looking upward. A sunny morning, too cold to be nesting,

Unless that is a nest the crow has seized, against the coming spring.

We’ve been at this historical site before, but not in any history we remember.

The present has been cloaked in cloud before, and not on any holy mountaintop.

To know the stars will one day fly apart so far they can’t be seen

Is almost a relief. For the future flies in one direction—toward us.

And the only way to sidestep it—the only way—is headed this way, too.

So, look. That woman’s got a child by the hand. She’s dragging him across the street.

He’s crying and she’s shouting, but we see only dumbshow. Their breath is smoke.

Will she give in and comfort him? Will he concede at last? We do not know.

Their words are smoke. In a minute they’ll be somewhere else entirely.

Everyone in a minute will be somewhere else entirely. As the crow flies.

From Wiki: Wheat Field with Crows depicts a dramatic, cloudy sky filled with crows over a wheat field.  A sense of isolation is heightened by a central path leading nowhere and by the uncertain direction of flight of the crows.   Jules Michelet, one of van Gogh's favorite authors, wrote of the crows: "They interest themselves in everything, and observe everything. The ancients, who lived far more completely than ourselves in and with nature, found it no small profit to follow, in a hundred obscure things where human experience as yet affords no light, the directions of so prudent and sage a bird."

Mark Jarman, “Interesting Times” from Bone Fires: New and Selected Poems. Copyright © 2011 by Mark Jarman. 

When I Heard the Learn'd Astronomer by Walt Whitman

When I heard the learn’d astronomer,

When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me,

When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them,

When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,

How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick,

Till rising and gliding out I wander’d off by myself,

In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,

Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.

Little Diary of Getting Old, Part VIII by Carlo Bettochi

And then at night, when old, 

we start having vague pointless

scraps of dreams that lead us

to this place or that, since even

our failing senses insist on

outings: and lost friends reappear, 

sleepwalking through the stupor 

of surrendered existence.

But here too there’s something

that’s not unconscious, as when

the boatman stops his old ferry 

along the banks of the Arno, 

plunges his wooden bailer 

into the bottom of the boat, 

and dumps that stale water,

gone to grime between the staves,

overboard into the river,

where it flows again,

though the boat is held fast

amid the mud and rushes.

(translated by Geoffrey Brock)

The Cold Heaven by W.B. Yeats

Suddenly I saw the cold and rook-delighting Heaven

That seemed as though ice burned and was but the more ice

And thereupon imagination and heart were driven

So wild that every casual thought of that and this

Vanished, and left but memories, that should be out of season

With the hot bloom of youth, of love crossed long ago;

And I took all the blame out of all sense and reason,

Until I cried and trembled and rocked to and fro,

Riddled with light.  Ah! when the ghost begins to quicken,

Confusion of the death-bed over, is it sent

Out naked on the roads, as the books say, and stricken

By the injustice of the skies for punishment?

NOTE: The visionary moment in the first half of this poem is powerful and, to me, entirely relatable.