What I Dream Of For Me

 HURRICANE

Mary Oliver

It didn’t behave

Like anything you

Ever imagined. The wind

Tore at the the trees, the rain

Fell for days slant and hard. 

The back of the hand

To everything. I watched

The trees bow and their leaves fall

And crawl back into the earth. 

As though, that was that. 

This was one hurricane

I lived through, the other one

Was of a different sort, and

Lasted longer. Then 

I felt my own leaves giving up and

Falling. The back the hand to 

Everything. But listen now to what happened

To the actual trees

Toward the end of that summer they

Pushed new leaves from their stubbed limbs. 

It was the wrong season, yes, 

But they couldn't stop. They 

Looked like telephone poles and didn't 

Care. and after the leaves came

Blossoms. For some things

There are no wrong seasons. 

Which is what I dream of for me.

In March the Earth Remembers it's own name

Worm Moon

 

by Mary Oliver

I.
In March the earth remembers its own name.
Everywhere the plates of snow are cracking.
The rivers begin to sing. In the sky
the winter stars are sliding away; new stars
appear as, later, small blades of grain
will shine in the dark fields.

And the name of every place
is joyful.

II.
The season of curiosity is everlasting
and the hour for adventure never ends,
but tonight
even the men who walked upon the moon
are lying content
by open windows
where the winds are sweeping over the fields,
over water,
over the naked earth,
into villages, and lonely country houses, and the vast cities

III.
because it is spring;
because once more the moon and the earth are eloping -
a love match that will bring forth fantastic children
who will learn to stand, walk, and finally run
   over the surface of earth;
who will believe, for years,
that everything is possible.

IV.
Born of clay,
how shall a man be holy;
born of water,
how shall a man visit the stars;
born of the seasons,
how shall a man live forever?

V.
Soon
the child of the red-spotted newt, the eft,
will enter his life from the tiny egg.
On his delicate legs
he will run through the valleys of moss
down to the leaf mold by the streams,
where lately white snow lay upon the earth
like a deep and lustrous blanket
of moon-fire,

VI.
and probably
everything
is possible.