A Blessing by Mary Oliver

Photo by Theresa Barney

I know, you never intended to be in this world.

But you're in it all the same.

So why not get started immediately.

I mean, belonging to it.

There is so much to admire, to weep over.

And to write music or poems about.

Bless the feet that take you to and fro.

Bless the eyes and the listening ears.

Bless the tongue, the marvel of taste.

Bless touching.

You could live a hundred years, it's happened.

Or not.

I am speaking from the fortunate platform of many years,

none of which, I think, I ever wasted.

Do you need a prod?

Do you need a little darkness to get you going?

Let me be as urgent as a knife, then, and remind you of Keats,

so single of purpose and thinking, for a while,

he had a lifetime.

~Mary Oliver, from Blue Horses

 

          

                   Maybe our world will grow kinder eventually.
                   Maybe the desire to make something beautiful
                   is the piece of God that is inside each of us.

                   ............ Mary Oliver

Persephone

                                                My audio poem Persephone's Feast Day 

was presented at Kathy Keler's Carport Theatre recently, put to the extraordinary  music of Metisse (the piece is from their album Nomah's Land)  

I was pleased to share this poem, which has a lot of meaning for me.  Persephone is the Goddess of the turning wheel of planetary life;  for she is both the Spring Maiden who brings the rebirth of the world at the spring equinox, and she is also the fearsome Queen of Death, who rules for part of the year in the underworld with Hades.  She is the ever changing Goddess of liminality.  

 https://soundcloud.com/user-972033003/persephones-feast-day

The Ghosts of Mendocino

 

There are seamless  moments that reveal

a pulse

rolling down 47th street, or the freeway

a pulse, not apart perhaps

from a white capped wave that just

broke on a summer shoreline in Mendocino

and now ripples a white farewell to Africa.

I want to tell someone (who will believe me?)

that if I lift this foot

a spiral galaxy

will spill like cream

across the fine dark pavement of eternity.

(1989) from "A House of Doors - Open Poems"

Saying Hello to Mother Ocean

The Way I Think It Really Is......

 The green plants

         magically
from water      air
the soil
from water      earth
    air
earth        water
air            light
earth and sunlight

sunlight
vibrating waves
        shimmering
grasses in the sun

........Felicia Miller*

Saying Farewell 

Pink Ladies say "Hello"

 "Then what is the answer?— Not to be deluded by dreams.
To know that great civilizations have broken down into violence,
and their tyrants come, many times.
To keep one’s own integrity, 
and not wish for evil and not be duped
by dreams of universal justice or happiness.
Those dreams will not be fulfilled.
To know this, and yet know that however ugly the parts appear
the whole remains beautiful. 

Integrity is wholeness, beauty is
Organic wholeness

Love that, not man apart from that"

Not Man Apart - Robinson Jeffers

 

*My friend Felicia passed away in 2010 - she was a mermaid never entirely easy on land.  Robinson Jeffers spent much of his life wandering the Big Sur coastline of California.  I always think of them both when I visit the coast, feeling perhaps their spirits leaving footprints in the sand still.