Category Archives: nature

See how they banter and riot.

nature, poetry, ,

It’s the season for Cabbage Whites! I’ve written about them before, and posted several poems. Mary doesn’t name these as Cabbage Whites, but I’m assuming. It doesn’t matter; the delightful thing is that she describes the essential “delicate in a hurry” nature of them, such that one wonders if they will ever stop and drink. Of course they eventually do, and I can get a decent picture of them then; but it’s the lobbing and banging I can never capture, so I’m glad Mary has done it, in rhythm and words.

SEVEN WHITE BUTTERFLIES

Seven white butterflies
delicate in a hurry look
how they bang the pages
…….of their wings as they fly

to the fields of mustard yellow
and orange and plain
gold all eternity
…….is in the moment this is what

Blake said Whitman said such
wisdom in the agitated
motions of the mind seven
…….dancers floating

even as worms toward
paradise see how they banter
and riot and rise
…….to the trees flutter

lob their white bodies into
the invisible wind weightless
lacy willing
…….to deliver themselves unto

the universe now each settles
down on a yellow thumb on a
brassy stem now
…….all seven are rapidly sipping

from the golden tower who
would have thought it could be so easy?

-Mary Oliver

 

The cricket sings.

nature, poetry, , ,

ON THE GRASSHOPPER AND THE CRICKET

The poetry of earth is never dead:
When all the birds are faint with the hot sun,
And hide in cooling trees, a voice will run
From hedge to hedge about the new-mown mead;
That is the Grasshopper’s—he takes the lead
In summer luxury,—he has never done
With his delights; for when tired out with fun
He rests at ease beneath some pleasant weed.
The poetry of earth is ceasing never:
On a lone winter evening, when the frost
Has wrought a silence, from the stove there shrills
The Cricket’s song, in warmth increasing ever,
And seems to one in drowsiness half lost,
The Grasshopper’s among some grassy hills.

-John Keats

Yorkshire 2015 – Pippin photo

I thought the earth remembered me.

nature, poetry, , , , ,

SLEEPING IN THE FOREST

I thought the earth remembered me,
she took me back so tenderly,
arranging her dark skirts, her pockets
full of lichens and seeds.
I slept as never before, a stone on the river bed,
nothing between me and the white fire of the stars
but my thoughts, and they floated light as moths
among the branches of the perfect trees.
All night I heard the small kingdoms
breathing around me, the insects,
and the birds who do their work in the darkness.
All night I rose and fell, as if in water,
grappling with a luminous doom. By morning
I had vanished at least a dozen times
into something better.

-Mary Oliver

June Night by Charles Ephraim Burchfield, 1959

The prospects of domination.

nature, politics, quotes,
by Carl Larsson

 

“The public interest has shifted from the nature of man to the nature of nature and to the prospects of domination its exploration opened; and the loss of interest even turned to hatred when the nature of man proved to be resistant to the changes dreamed up by intellectuals who want to add the lordship of society and history to the mastery of nature.”

― Eric Voegelin