Seasons and The Eternal Fadings and Showings

 

Today my poetry group is offering poems of the seasons, personal, earthly, cosmic, tidal and liturgical. In trying to decide what to offer, it occurred to me that I wanted to find something timeless which might reveal a wisdom applicable to the notion of all eternal cyclical changing. These universal seasons have certain things in common whether pulled or pushed by sun, moon or God. The commonality on which I focused was that there is an imperceptible fading like sunset which inevitably merges into dawning no matter what the seasonal change. There is a continuum of the eternal which holds these cycles. To appreciate and comprehend these thresholds and accompanying liminality requires our full attention. 

So First Snow by Mary Oliver is on the one hand about the season of Winter. On the other hand it is about all seasons and one might write poetically about a manifestation of spring with buds and color similarly. Moreover, it is about seasons of love or dying or birth as I imagine a poem of the season of hospice wherein memories and music provide the blanket of comfort. No matter what we look for meaning in the movement of time.

The lines: “calling us back to why, how,/whence such beauty and what/the meaning” provide the universal message of importance. In that pause of appreciation, in that stillness and following expression, seasons happen and we are called again and again to “be astonished” in the whys, hows, wheres, and whats of the expression from the Mystery of eternal and enduring changings....and as Oliver suggests, answers. Enjoy:

First Snow by Mary Oliver

The snow

began here

this morning and all day

continued, its white

rhetoric everywhere

calling us back to why, how,

whence such beauty and what

the meaning; such

an oracular fever! flowing

past windows, an energy it seemed

would never ebb, never settle

less than lovely! and only now,

deep into night,

it has finally ended.

The silence

is immense,

and the heavens still hold

a million candles, nowhere

the familiar things:

stars, the moon,

the darkness we expect

and nightly turn from. Trees

glitter like castles

of ribbons, the broad fields

smolder with light, a passing

creekbed lies

heaped with shining hills;

and though the questions

that have assailed us all day

remain — not a single

answer has been found —

walking out now

into the silence and the light

under the trees,

and through the fields,

feels like one.

~Mary Oliver~