Snow and Poetry

Our delicious spring was interrupted with the usual but always unexpected April snow. Alder and I have been cuddling and playing on the couch all day. He's sleeping now.

From: 1945-1985: Poem for the Anniversary
by Mary Oliver


Sometimes,
walking for hours through the wood,
I don't know what I'm looking for,
maybe for something
shy and beautiful to come
frisking out of the undergrowth.

Once a fawn did just that.
My dog didn't know
what dogs usually do.
And the fawn didn't know.

For as a doe, she was probably
down in Round Pond, swizzling up
the sweet marsh grass and dreaming
that everything was fine.

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The way I'd like to go on living in this world
wouldn't hurt anything, I'd just go on
walking uphill and downhill, looking around,
and so what if half the time I don't know
what for-

so what if it doesn't come
to a hill of beans-

so what if I voted liberal,

and am Jewish,
or Lutheran-

or a game warden-

or a bingo addict-

and smoke a pipe?

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In the films of Dachau and Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen
the dead rise from the earth
and are piled in front of us, the starved
stare across forty years,
and lush, green musical Germany
shows again its iron claw, which won't

ever be forgotten, which won't
ever be understood, but which did,
slowly, for years, scrape across Europe

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while the rest of the world
did nothing.

This poem stirred my soul yesterday.