Poems and Other Writings

This page is dedicated to "singing" the landscapes of our inner ecology and earth to life. Each month, together we'll explore a new poem or piece of writing. We'll see how language that focuses on the particulars of the outer wilderness, can return us to the truth of our inner wilderness.

Please feel free to ponder the questions elicited by the poem below. Memorize a stanza or two. Write a poem of your own. And, if you like, please email me with your own observations, poetry, and thoughts. I'd love to hear from you.

January 2009

The Sea

Stroke by
     stroke my
          body remembers that life and cries for
               the lost parts of itself -
fins, gills
     opening like flowers into
          the flesh--my legs
               want to lock and become
one muscle, I swear I know
     just what the blue-gray scales
          shingling
               the rest of me would
feel like!
     paradise! Sprawled
          in that motherlap,
               in that dreamhouse
of salt and exercise,
     what a spillage
          of nostalgia pleads
               from the very bones! how
they long to give up the long trek
     inland, the brittle
          beauty of understanding,
               and dive,
and simply
     become again a flaming body
          of blind feeling
               sleeking along
in the luminous roughage of the sea's body,
     vanished
          like victory inside that
               insucking genesis, that
roaring flamboyance, that
     perfect
          beginning and
               conclusion of our own.

© Mary Oliver

• Are there lost parts of yourself you would you like to reclaim?
  
  
• What would it be like to become a "flaming body of blind feeling?"
  
  
• Begin a poem with the lines, "My body remembers..." As you write, feel into the body's wisdom.

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