1 <br /> <br />Last night the geese came back, <br />slanting fast <br />from the blossom of the rising moon down <br />to the black pond. A muskrat <br />swimming in the twilight saw them and hurried <br /> <br />to the secret lodges to tell everyone <br />spring had come. <br /> <br />And so it had. <br />By morning when I went out <br />the last of the ice had disappeared, blackbirds <br />sang on the shores. Every year <br />the geese, returning, <br />do this, I don’t <br />know how. <br /> <br /> <br /> 2 <br /> <br />The curtains opened and there was <br />an old man in a headdress of feathers, <br />leather leggings and a vest made <br />from the skin of some animal. He danced <br /> <br />in a kind of surly rapture, and the trees <br />in the fields far away <br />began to mutter and suck up their long roots. <br />Slowly they advanced until they stood <br />pressed to the schoolhouse windows. <br /> <br /> <br /> 3 <br /> <br />I don’t know <br />lots of things but I know this: next year <br />when spring <br />flows over the starting point I’ll think I’m going to <br />drown in the shimmering miles of it and then <br />one or two birds will fly me over <br />the threshold. <br /> <br /> As for the pain <br />of others, of course it tries to be <br />abstract, but then <br /> <br />there flares up out of a vanished wilderness, like fire, <br />still blistering: the wrinkled face <br />of an old Chippewa <br />smiling, hating us, <br />dancing for his life.<br /><br />Mary Oliver<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/two-kinds-of-deliverance/
