Delayed

7/21/2021 caught mid-motion

Jul 21CommentShare
“Hoped I would be heading up, up and over — a thunderstorm and the spasms of Capital’s death shudders canceled my flight, and without thought, I’m moving laterally along the ground”
“All of it has happened before, walking along, rather than flying above, but I would be lying if I said with this frequency - My brother and I were disappointed although our disappointment doesn’t annul the chance of further delay”

Yesterday, Larry Robinson, the extraordinary Sonoma County poet sent out on his wonderful daily-poetry list, Poetry Lovers a poem by Mary Oliver “Shadows”:

Shadows

Everyone knows the great energies running amok cast
terrible shadows, that each of the so-called
senseless acts has its thread looping
back through the world and into a human heart.
        And meanwhile
the gold-trimmed thunder
wanders the sky; the river
may be filling the cellars of the sleeping town.
Cyclone, fire and their merry cousins
        brings us to grief - but these are the hours
with the old wooden-god faces;
we lift them to our shoulders like so many
black coffins, we continue walking
into the future. I don’t mean
        there are no bodies in the river,
or bones broken by the wind. I mean
everyone who has heard the lethal train-roar
of the tornado swears there was no mention ever
of any person, or reason - I mean
        the waters rise without any plot upon
history, or even geography. Whatever
power of the earth rampages , we turn to it
dazed but anonymous eyes; whatever
the name of the catastrophe, it is never
        the opposite of truth.

        - Mary Oliver
“I commented ‘This captures what I’ve been thinking, perfectly’”

He had made an error, changing the last word, to truth, when Mary had written:

Shadows

Everyone knows the great energies running amok cast
terrible shadows, that each of the so-called
senseless acts has its thread looping
back through the world and into a human heart.
        And meanwhile
the gold-trimmed thunder
wanders the sky; the river
may be filling the cellars of the sleeping town.
Cyclone, fire and their merry cousins
        brings us to grief - but these are the hours
with the old wooden-god faces;
we lift them to our shoulders like so many
black coffins, we continue walking
into the future. I don’t mean
        there are no bodies in the river,
or bones broken by the wind. I mean
everyone who has heard the lethal train-roar
of the tornado swears there was no mention ever
of any person, or reason - I mean
        the waters rise without any plot upon
history, or even geography. Whatever
power of the earth rampages , we turn to it
dazed but anonymous eyes; whatever
the name of the catastrophe, it is never
        the opposite of love.

        - Mary Oliver
“That subtle switch from ‘truth’ to ‘love’ changed everything, now its the most divine expression of how I feel”

Now that we have removed the deep, deep self whose gate is often boredom, by our culture of distraction, it’s good to remember the gold-trimmed thunder can suddenly and abruptly make what’s important known in the deep, deep revealing at that moment, with truth and love.

Well, y’all, trying again tomorrow,

Con/Jur/d, 7/21/2021

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