Nurturing Thursday: All Simple in the Springtime

The First Rose

 You Held On During the Dark

Time embrace the sweetness!

Spring

by Mary Oliver

Somewhere
a black bear
has just risen from sleep
and is staring

down the mountain.
All night
in the brisk and shallow restlessness
of early spring

I think of her,
her four black fists
flicking the gravel,
her tongue

like a red fire
touching the grass,
the cold water.
There is only one question:

how to love this world.
I think of her
rising
like a black and leafy ledge

to sharpen her claws against
the silence
of the trees.
Whatever else

my life is
with its poems
and its music
and its glass cities,

it is also this dazzling darkness
coming
down the mountain,
breathing and tasting;

all day I think of her—
her white teeth,
her wordlessness,
her perfect love.

I pull Mary Oliver’s Bear Poem out every year on the first day of Spring

every  year the bear comes down the mountain

claws sparking on the gravel

with her  questions  and her perfect love

and every year I know

I have pulled free of winter’s hold one more time.

>^<>^<>^<

Today is the first day of spring, or the vernal equinox, when the earth’s axis is aligned with the center of the sun. The word equinox comes from Latin: aequus means equal, level, or calm; nox means night, or darkness. The equinox, in spring or fall,is a time when the day and night are as close to equal as they ever are, and when the hours of night are exactly equal for people living equidistant from the equator either north or south.

Robert Frost wrote: ”

Oh, give us pleasure in the flowers today;

And give us not to think so far away

As the uncertain harvest; keep us here

All simply in the springing of the year.”

The Writers Almanac

Nurturing Thursday

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Laurie’s Notes
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Pocket Perspectives
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