Weekly Reading

Boundaries

There is a place where the town ends,
and the fields begin.
It's not marked but the feet know it,
also the heart that is longing for refreshment
and, equally, for repose.

Someday we'll live in the sky.
Meanwhile, the house of our lives is this green world.
The fields, the ponds, the birds.
The thick black oaks-surely they are
the invention of something wonderful.
And the tiger lilies.
And the runaway honeysuckle that no one
will ever trim again.

Where is it? I ask, and then
my feet know it.

One jump, and I am home.
~Mary Oliver

Weekly Reading

Lingering in Happiness

After rain after many days without rain,
it stays cool, private and cleansed, under the trees,
and the dampness there, married now to gravity,
falls branch to branch, leaf to leaf, down to the ground

where it will disappear — but not, of course, vanish
except to our eyes. The roots of the oaks will have their share,
and the white threads of the grasses, and the cushion of moss;
a few drops, round as pearls, will enter the mole's tunnel;

and soon so many small stones, buried for a thousand years,
will feel themselves being touched.

~Mary Oliver

Weekly Reading

Even
after
all this time
the sun never says to the earth,

"You owe me."

Look
what happens
with a love like that-

it lights the whole
world.

~Hafiz