Poetry for a Lenten Saturday: Mary Oliver

A bit of a change of pace...sharing a wee reflection from Mary Oliver on this Saturday morning -- or any morning, for that matter -- during a time when, perhaps, all one is able or permitted to do, is to stare out the window...


Morning

Salt shining behind its glass cylinder
Milk in a blue bowl.  The yellow linoleum.
The cat stretching her black body from the pillow.
The way she makes her curvaceous response to the small, kind gesture.
Then laps the bowl clean.
Then wants to go out into the world
where she leaps lightly and for no apparent reason across the lawn,
then sits, perfectly still, in the grass.
I watch her a little while, thinking:
what more could I do with wild words?
I stand in the cold kitchen, bowing to her.
I stand in the cold kitchen, everything wonderful around me.

-- Mary Oliver, from New and Selected Poems, Beacon Press, Boston, 1992

Milk in a Blue Bowl
(C) 2020 - G.M.B.
(Click to enlarge)