Tuesday, April 9, 2019

Wild and Perfect and then Nothing, Forever

Welp, a couple of weeks ago, I vowed to take a Twitter break for a week, but then Trump's Attorney General William Barr issued his summary of the Mueller Report and the mainstream media and important political commentators were widely like, "Oh, okay, thanks for the update. Time to move on and focus on the real issues facing the nation, I guess."

And, it turns out that Twitter can be useful to avoid being completely gaslit, even as Twitter is terrible in other ways, including the way it can contribute to gaslighting.

Alas. 

I have kept my vow to read poetry regularly, however.

Today's poem is brought to us by Mary Oliver, as I'm currently making my way through her New and Selected Poems, Volume One. Here's a snippet of "Peonies," although I invite you to read the whole thing, of course:

"Do you also hurry, half-dressed and barefoot, into the garden,
     and softly,
          and exclaiming of their dearness,
               fill your arms with white and pink flowers,

with their honeyed heaviness, their lush trembling,
     their eagerness
          to be wild and perfect for a moment, before they are
               nothing, forever?"

I guess it's the juxtaposition of the impermanent beauty of nature/life with existential dread that is really speaking to me about Oliver's poems at the moment.

Talk about stuff, or whatever.

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