Put down the weight of your aloneness and ease into the conversation.

Pay attention to everything in the world,  as if it's alive. 

David Whyte

 

Persephone (2016)

The Big Thaw

starts with a trickle

water running through silence

as innocuous as breath

a slight relaxation

at the corners of the mouth.

Just when winter

has become a habit.

An old coat the sun peels off 

with just  a touch,

your foot

leaves a signature

in new mud

shiny as  new skin

or fresh, primed canvas

You notice a blade of grass

green, defiantly green.

Inhale,

you take your coat off

a crocus opens

in the blue iris

of some one's glance.

Lauren Raine

Vermont, 1982

Spring

by Mary Oliver

Somewhere
a black bear
has just risen from sleep
and is staring

down the mountain.
All night
in the brisk and shallow restlessness
of early spring

I think of her,
her four black fists
flicking the gravel,
her tongue

like a red fire
touching the grass,
the cold water.
There is only one question:

how to love this world.
I think of her
rising
like a black and leafy ledge

to sharpen her claws against
the silence
of the trees.
Whatever else

my life is
with its poems
and its music
and its glass cities,

it is also this dazzling darkness
coming
down the mountain,
breathing and tasting;

all day I think of her -—
her white teeth,
her wordlessness,
her perfect love.

From: 

 New and Selected Poems

Copyright ©: 

 Mary Oliver