Tuesday 9 August 2011

{Maybe}... A Month of Poetry

Sweet Jesus, talking
his melancholy madness,
stood up in the boat
and the sea lay down,

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silky and sorry.
So everybody was saved
that night.
But you know how it is
when something
different crosses
the threshold -- the uncles
mutter together,
the women walk away,
the young brother begins
to sharpen his knife.
Nobody knows what the soul is.
It comes and goes
like the wind over the water --
sometimes, for days,
you don't think of it.
Maybe, after the sermon,
after the multitude was fed,
one or two of them felt
the soul slip forth

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like a tremor of pure sunlight
before exhaustion,
that wants to swallow everything,
gripped their bones and left them
miserable and sleepy,
as they are now, forgetting
how the wind tore at the sails
before he rose and talked to it --
Water
tender and luminous and demanding
as he always was --
a thousand times more frightening
than the killer storm.

Mary Oliver

9 comments:

  1. love this. . . and the photos are beautiful.

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  2. Beautiful poem. Paints a pretty graphic picture. Thank you! Cathy

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  3. Lovely poem... equally lovely photos
    (Mary Oliver never disappoints...)

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  4. Oh, Suzy. That's beautiful. The photos fit so perfectly, too. Thank you…

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  5. Beautiful! I adore everything Mary Oliver. xx

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  6. Lovely pictures. Did you take them?

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  7. Very glorious/pretty pictures and excellent poetry. :)

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  8. beautiful Suzy, all of it...
    xx oo

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  9. Thank you Suzy, this is wonderful. Mary Oliver is so powerful, and your photos are the perfect accompaniment.

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