Mary Oliver
Tell me about despair,
yours,
and I will tell you
mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear
pebbles of the rain are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies
and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild
geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
I'm not thinking despair is particularly seasonal. After all "the winter of our discontent" is now merely a turn of phrase. There's a certain irony in this, that despair persists in light of prairies, clear pool dimpled by pebbles of rain, trees, sun, geese -- perhaps despair told is despair halved, or something, so the world can be visible again.
ReplyDeleteIt's hard to say many of Oliver's poems are... pretty, but perhaps that is trite, anyway.
No despair is never relegated to a particular season; it ought to be--showers of cherry petals and beaming daffodils are grating on the nerves when one wants the universe to grieve alongside oneself.
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