Emma

“Fear is the cheapest room in the house.
I would like to see you living
In better conditions.”
― Hafiz

“6
Look, I want to love this world
as though it’s the last chance I’m ever going to get
to be alive
and know it.
7
Sometimes in late summer I won’t touch anything, not
the flowers, not the blackberries
brimming in the thickets; I won’t drink
from the pond; I won’t name the birds or the trees;
I won’t whisper my own name.
One morning
the fox came down the hill, glittering and confident,
and didn’t see me—and I thought:
so this is the world.
I’m not in it.
It is beautiful.”
― Mary Oliver, New and Selected Poems, Volume One

“White Flowers
by Mary Oliver
***
Last night
in the fields
I lay down in the darkness
to think about death,
but instead I fell asleep,
as if in a vast and sloping room
filled with those white flowers
that open all summer,
sticky and untidy,
in the warm fields.
When I woke
the morning light was just slipping
in front of the stars,
and I was covered
with blossoms.
I don’t know
how it happened—
I don’t know
if my body went diving down
under the sugary vines
in some sleep-sharpened affinity
with the depths, or whether
that green energy
rose like a wave
and curled over me, claiming me
in its husky arms.
I pushed them away, but I didn’t rise.
Never in my life had I felt so plush,
or so slippery,
or so resplendently empty.
Never in my life
had I felt myself so near
that porous line
where my own body was done with
and the roots and the stems and the flowers began.”
― Mary Oliver, New and Selected Poems, Volume One

“And the trouble is, if you don't risk anything, you risk even more.”
― Erica Jong