Susan Braun

“The Moths

There's a kind of white moth, I don't know
what kind, that glimmers
by mid-May
in the forest, just
as the pink moccasin flowers
are rising.

If you notice anything,
it leads you to notice
more
and more.

And anyway
I was so full of energy.
I was always running around, looking
at this and that.

If I stopped
the pain
was unbearable.

If I stopped and thought, maybe
the world
can't be saved,
the pain
was unbearable.

Finally, I had noticed enough.
All around me in the forest
the white moths floated.

How long do they live, fluttering
in and out of the shadows?

You aren't much, I said
one day to my reflection
in a green pond,
and grinned.

The wings of the moths catch the sunlight
and burn
so brightly.

At night, sometimes,
they slip between the pink lobes
of the moccasin flowers and lie there until dawn,
motionless
in those dark halls of honey.”
― Mary Oliver, New and Selected Poems, Volume One

“I went to China,
I went to Prague;
I died, and was born in the spring;
I found you, and loved you, again.”
― Mary Oliver, White Pine: Poems and Prose Poems

“A reader wants, above all, to feel a range of emotions--excitement, love, hate, misery, and everything in between them; wants to breathe characters’ air & see the world through their eyes.”
― Mark Rubinstein

“The Hermit Crab

Once I looked inside
the darkness
of a sheel folded like a pastry,
and there was a fancy face-

or almost a face-
it turned away
and frisked up its brawny forearms
so quickly

against the light
and my looking in
I scarcely had time to see it,
gleaming

under the pure white roof
of old calcium
When I set it down, it hurried
along the tideline

of the sea,
which was slashing along as usual,
shouting and hissing
toward the future,

turning its back
with every tide on the past,
leaving the shore littered
ever morning

with ornaments of death-
what a pearly rubble
from which to choose a house
like a white flower-

and what a rebellion
to leap into it
and hold on,
connecting everything,

the past to the future-
which is of course the miracle-
which is the only argument there is
against the sea.”
― Mary Oliver, New and Selected Poems, Volume One