Thanks to Gaile on one of my FB groups for posting this today:
“I thought the earth remembered me,
she took me back so tenderly,
arranging her dark skirts, her pockets
full of lichens and seeds.
I slept as never before, a stone on the river bed,
nothing between me and the white fire of the stars
but my thoughts and they floated light as moths
among the branches of the perfect trees.
All night I heard the small kingdoms
breathing around me, the insects,
and the birds who do their work in the darkness.
All night I rose and fell, as if in water,
grappling with a luminous doom. By morning
I had vanished at least a dozen times’
into something better.”
~ Mary Oliver ~
Poetry inspires by combining the familiar with the unexpected. Who hasn’t slept out under the stars and felt these things? The line that does it for me in this poem, “All night I heard the small kingdoms breathing around me….” reminds me that all is breathing… along with me, and pulls me into the feeling of that. Details like this are what made her unique and masterful and one of the most important voices of our time.