my favorite poem...

it's kind of like my favorite song, forever changing with the moment, the mood.

It's not something a lot of people know about me. Us poetry geeks don't advertise our infirmity, in order to continue winning friends and being seen as normal. However, I big puffy heart poetry and am going to climb that water tower and declare my love in red spray paint!

Well, no, that's too much.

We poetry lovers are more demure than that. I think I will just, occasionally, post a favorite one on my blog. Because a blog is a way of saving memories for yourself and also sharing your heart with others. And there is nothing more revealing, I think, than your reading preferences.



Those of you who also, secretly, love poetry...enjoy.
The other 87% of you can just skip the posts.



Messenger by Mary Oliver

My work is loving the world.
Here the sunflowers, there the hummingbird--
equal seekers of sweetness.
Here the quickening yeast; there the blue plums.
Here the clam deep in the speckled sand.

Are my boots old? Is my coat torn?
Am I no longer young, and still not half-perfect? Let me
keep my mind on what matters,
which is my work,

which is mostly standing still and learning to be
astonished.
The phoebe, the delphinium.
The sheep in the pasture, and the pasture.
Which is mostly rejoicing, since all the ingredients are here,

which is gratitude, to be given a mind and a heart
and these body-clothes,
a mouth with which to give shouts of joy
to the moth and the wren, to the sleepy dug-up clam,
telling them all, over and over, how it is
that we live forever.