What can we do
but keep on breathing in and out,
modest and willing,
in our places?

~ From ‘Stars’, a poem by Mary Oliver

In ‘Stars’, as in most of Mary Oliver’s poems, nature looms large . She sees it as the stage on which the attentive person has much to learn. But we live in a world that cares little for quiet time rambling in the woods. Time flows fast like a rushing river and we are swept by it, day in and day out, with no time to reflect on what costs nothing but is priceless in every way. Here’s a poem I wrote, sitting at the footstools of Mary Oliver as it were, on a clear summer day when the sky is bluer than bluer and the fields are alive with the colors and sounds of a world within this one. I title it ‘Learning to Dance”

Learning to Dance

There is modesty in nature,
in the small and in the large.
The wind shakes, and the leaves nod
by just the right amount.

There is beauty in nature
unmerited and extravagant,
invisible to a world that
has no time for beauty.

There is balance in nature.
A tree falls by its own reckoning,
and from its fall, a forest rises.

I say this as I sit under a
sycamore tree, the sun
shining brightly through the
leaves and everything precarious
is holding lovingly in its place.

I can sit here all day,
listening to my breath
merge with the breath
of the earth and learn to
love again, and dance again,
and recover what was never lost.

~ Wallace Fong, May 2024.