By Mary Oliver, from Evidence
One summer
I went every morning
to the edge of a pond where
a huddle of just-hatched geese
would paddle to me
and clamber
up the marshy slope
and over my body,
peeping and staring –
such sweetness every day
which the grown ones watched,
for whatever reason,
serenely.
Not there, however, but here
is where the story begins.
Nature has many mysteries,
some of them severe.
Five of the young geese grew
heavy of chest and
bold of wing
while the sixth waited and waited
in its gauze-feathers, its body
that would not grow.
And then it was fall.
And this is what I think
everything is about:
the way
I was glad
for those five and two
that flew away,
and the way I hold in my heart the wingless one
that had to stay
What a beautiful poem, Freda, Thank you for sharing it with me.
Nice. Thank you for sharing it. 🙂
Lovely poem, and BTW, re your last blog on ‘fear’, I personally feel that people who blog are rather brave, entering as they do a territory that is, as yet, relatively undiscovered….who knows where it will all end. Either we are pioneers, or I’m just very slow in catching up with the rest of society.
Thanks Jane, from the chatter on blogs recently I sense that there is a pioneering spirit -especially about sharing honestly. So it did take courage to post about fear, and the fear of walking Misty on my own hasn’t gone yet, hopefully one day it will.