every morning (new)

Morning Poem

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.
-Mary Oliver

the peace of wild things

this morning my aunt fern emma sent me the poem at the end of this post, another one by wendell berry. 

a few years ago, following matt's time at seminary and before i went to grad school for painting, we drove across the country to chester, new jersey. chester is where my aunt fern emma and uncle arthur live, and at the time they were taking care of my grandfather in ohio, so their home was empty. their house is set back from a small, almost country, road, and is surrounded by trees. their backyard is essentially a field. during our stay there we were able to experience some of the stillness of nature that berry expresses in this poem. the deer and their fawns passed through the yard in the evening and early morning, moving slowly and gracefully and pausing the moment they heard a sound or saw movement. it was late fall when we were there, so the fall colors were at first aflame until slowly the trees began to shed their leaves. we would walk along the black river in the afternoon: we saw the work of the beavers on the felled, gnawed tree branches, the ducks as they glided through the water, and the twisted tree roots covering our path intertwined and wearing a fuzzy layer of moss. 

(one sunday as we passed the old mill and wound our way down to the path along the river, we realized that sunday was also a sanctioned hunting day! of course, neither of us was wearing orange, and we heard shots firing in the not so distant distance, so as my mom would say, we high-tailed it out of there!)

aside from hunting days, our season at their home was one of peace, and one in which we were able to rest in the grace of the world.

The Peace of Wild Things

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

— Wendell Berry

A Prodigal

The brown enormous odor he lived by
was too close, with its breathing and thick hair,
for him to judge. The floor was rotten; the sty
was plastered halfway up with glass-smooth dung.
Light-lashed, self-righteous, above moving snouts,
the pigs' eyes followed him, a cheerful stare--
even to the sow that always ate her young--
till, sickening, he leaned to scratch her head.
But sometimes mornings after drinking bouts
(he hid the pints behind the two-by-fours),
the sunrise glazed the barnyard mud with red
the burning puddles seemed to reassure.
And then he thought he almost might endure
his exile yet another year or more.

But evenings the first star came to warn.
The farmer whom he worked for came at dark
to shut the cows and horses in the barn
beneath their overhanging clouds of hay,
with pitchforks, faint forked lightnings, catching light,
safe and companionable as in the Ark.
The pigs stuck out their little feet and snored.
The lantern--like the sun, going away--
laid on the mud a pacing aureole.
Carrying a bucket along a slimy board,
he felt the bats' uncertain staggering flight,
his shuddering insights, beyond his control,
touching him. But it took him a long time
finally to make up his mind to go home.

Elizabeth Bishop