Between getting the budget lined up for March, paying my regular bills, and working on filing my taxes, I somehow lost the weekend and suffocated my soul. All I wanted to do last night was crawl into bed and just go to sleep, but I took the time to drink from Mary Oliver’s poetry. There’s always fresh water there! And though I feel Wordsworth’s “The World is Too Much With Us” is a fitting post for today, let’s keep my Mary Oliver Mondays motif alive. I’ll save Wordsworth for tax day!
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.
“Morning Poem” by Mary Oliver from Devotions: The Selected Poems of Mary Oliver © Penguin Books, 2017: pg. 345.
the deepening ground 