Hello there listener,
Thank you so much for your attention.
Today I have for you a selection of three beautiful poems by Mary Oliver.
The first one is called The Ponds.
Every year,
The lilies are so perfect,
I can hardly believe their lapped light crowding the black midsummer ponds.
Nobody could count all of them.
The muscarats swimming among the paths and the grasses can reach out their muscular arms and touch only so many.
They are that rife and wild.
But what in this world is perfect?
I bend closer and see how this one is clearly lopsided.
And that one wears an orange blight.
And this one is a glossy cheek half nibbled away.
And that one is a slumped purse full of its own unstoppable decay.
Still,
What I want in my life is to be willing to be dazzled,
To cast aside the weight of facts and maybe even to float a little above this difficult world.
I want to believe I am looking into the white fire of a great mystery.
I want to believe that the imperfections are nothing,
That the light is everything,
That it is more than the sum of each flawed blossom rising and fading.
And I do.
The next poem I have for you is a morning poem.
Every morning,
The world is created under the orange sticks of the sun,
The heaped ashes of the night turning to leaves again and fasten themselves to the high branches.
And the ponds appear like black cloth on which are painted islands of summer lilies.
If it is your nature to be happy,
You will swim away along the soft trails for hours,
Your imagination alighting everywhere.
And if your spirit carries within it the thorn that is heavier than lead,
If it's all you can do to keep on trudging,
There is still somewhere deep within you a beast shouting that the earth is exactly what it wanted.
Each pond with its blazing lilies is a prayer heard and answered lavishly every morning.
Whether or not you have ever the earth to be happy,
Whether or not you have ever the earth to pray.
The third poem I have for you today is called The Sun.
Have you ever seen anything in your life more wonderful than the way the sun,
Every evening,
Relaxed and easy,
Floats towards the horizon and into the clouds or the hills or the rumpled sea and is gone?
And how its lights again,
Out of the blackness every morning on the other side of the world,
Like a red flower streaming upward on its heavenly oils,
Say on a morning in early summer at its perfect imperial distance.
And have you ever felt for anything such wild love?
Do you think there is anywhere in any language a world billowing enough for the pleasure that fills you as the sun reaches out,
As it warms you,
As you stand there empty-handed?
Or have you too turned from this world?
Or have you too gone crazy for power,
For things?
