Starlings In Winter Mary Oliver

Starlings in Winter
Mary Oliver

Mesomorphic and noisy,
but with stars in their black feathers,
they bound from the telephone wire
and instantly

they are acrobats
in the freezing wind.
And now, in the theater of air,
they swing over buildings,

dipping and rise;
they bladder like one stippled star
that opens,
becomes for a moment fragmented,

and then closes over again;
and you watch
and you try
but y'all simply can't imagine

how they practise it
with no articulated teaching, no pause,
just the silent confirmation
that they are this notable thing,

this wheel of many parts, that can ascension and spin
over and over again,
total of gorgeous life.
Ah, world, what lessons you lot fix for us,

fifty-fifty in the leafless wintertime,
even in the ashy city.
I am thinking now
of grief, and of getting past it;

I experience my boots
trying to go out the basis,
I feel my center
pumping hard, I desire

to call up again of dangerous and noble things.
I want to be light and frolicsome.
I desire to be improbable beautiful and afraid of null,
as though I had wings.

~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~

Skillful morning, good morning.

There's our morning central waking up, piercing the quiet with his vocal. Just now, when the puppy and I were walking across the backyard, I looked up at the sky and the stars seemed especially shut, like a coating, and in that location but overhead was a falling star.

For this month's verse form-writing project, I created a certificate with 55 poems in it, 1 to a page, and and so I use a random number generator on the internet to option a poem for me each morning. And then today's is Mary Oliver'southward Starlings in Winter.

I generally imagine Mary Oliver wandering through the woods on her morning time walks with her dogs, noticing and poeming herself into her mean solar day, scouring the quiet globe for delights she could share with u.s.a.. But in this verse form, she'south in the ashy city. She's dumbstruck for a moment while walking down the road, possibly on the way to a pedagogy gig or a day task, when a flock of starlings, those virtually ordinary and common birds all across the country, elevator up off the phone wires and murmurate instantly, bringing themselves together like a jiff, communicating in ways we cannot encounter or empathise. She is non feeling especially frolicsome or dangerous in this poem, only she wants to get dorsum there. How many of u.s. have had this feeling? How many of us are feeling it right now?

When I've shared this verse form before, I've read it as a poem of incitement and encouragement, but being with it again this morning, I feel the frustration beating at its heart, or maybe that is its mother: the I in the verse form is living a life that feels also condom, or maybe that is too heavy – full of grief that she wants to exist able to motility beyond. This is a verse form of longing and hungering, isn't information technology, for healing and for flight.

We small and dangerous and rageful things, we blips of wanting powdering effectually on our booted feet, looking down so we don't stumble, looking shut ahead at what'due south adjacent, forgetting the flight in united states of america and around united states: This is the second poem this month, I realize, almost a adult female watching birds at flight and wanting to join them – seeking to detect the retentiveness of flying in her own body, reaching for a actual knowing that she has grown as well far abroad from.

I'd like to enquire the poet the story of this verse form, but she is gone now – maybe it exists on the net somewhere, that story, that telling, but function of the magic of poems is being able to imagine our ain context into every verse form, into every reading of every poem. The poem brings the states an instant in time, a set of meanings and a possibility of words, and it requires a reader to bring the residual: a comprehension, a contextualization, a meeting, is what I mean to say, a torso and a breath and a life that exhales the meaning, for that reader, into the words. How does a verse form piece of work? Brilliant minds have worked for hundreds of years to put that into words.

Now birds are all waking upwardly, and I will join them soon for the walk on the small, high-tide beach with the puppy. I do not miss the ashy city. Something in me is remembering dangerousness and improbable beauty. Something in me wants to reach out across the heavy insistence of grief and loss toward the sky, toward the but brightening morning time, toward the pulse of the waves, toward the joy of my loves and this life.

We don't have to forget what has harmed us in society to continue to live – I don't believe nosotros even have to forgive. But we can slowly plough our attention abroad from the retentiveness, from the history, from the wound, to the candle flickering in her glass jar, to the robin making her way beyond the forenoon lawn, to the puppy's sleeping breaths and the strength we carry every minute of every day in our skin and in our hearts. Sometimes joy is the well-nigh dangerous thing. That's what I have this morning. Dangerous, I mean, for a system that would see me hamstrung e'er with inarticulable rage. Sometimes the virtually dangerous thing is delight, and seeking to share what we know, what we have learned, how to alive within a system that wants us minor and malleable, how to resist what wants to break u.s.a. apart and eat us, how to feed slowly and then, once we are able, how to feed hard and full and with laughter in our eyes.

~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~~ ~~

I am not sure what those last lines mean in the writing to a higher place, but that's the pleasure of the morning freewrite. Do you accept a response to Mary Oliver'due south verse form this morning? Ready a timer for 20 minutes, similar I merely did, and let yourself write – whether into the estimator or onto the page, information technology doesn't thing, whichever yous adopt. Drop into a word or a phrase or a feeling or a retentivity or a story that arises when you read the verse form – and follow the writing wherever it seems to want y'all to become, even if information technology takes a sharp right turn away from birds or flying into some new terrain. And be as easy with y'all as you can today, ok/ I will try to practise the same. I'm grateful for your words and your wisdom and your dangerousness today, y'all know.