Mary Oliver Monday
How about a little Mary Oliver to start the week off right:
Grass, by Mary Oliver
Those who disappointed, betrayed, scarified! Those who
would still put their hands upon me! Those who belong
to the past!
How many of us have weighted the years with groaning and
weeping? How many years have I done it how many nights
spent panting hating grieving, oh, merciless, pitiless remembrances!
I walk over the green hillsides, I lie down on the harsh, sun-
flavored blades and bundles of grass; the grass cares nothing
about me, it doesn’t want anything from me, it rises to its
own purpose, and sweetly, following the single holy dictum:
to be itself, to let the sky be the sky, to let a young girl
be a young girl freely–to let a middle-aged woman be, comfortably, a middle-aged woman.
Those bloody sharps and flats–those endless calamities of
the personal past. Bah! I disown them from the rest of my
life, in which I mean to rest.
(image: Landscape by Paul Gauguin)