Poetry Chaikhana Sacred Poetry from Around the World

Search the Poetry Chaikhana site:

<<Previous Poem | View All Poems by Mary Oliver | Next Poem >>
The Ponds by Mary Oliver (1935 - ) Timeline Original Language English Secular or Eclectic Contemporary Every year the lilies are so perfect I can hardly believe their lapped light crowding the black, mid-summer ponds. Nobody could count all of them -- the muskrats swimming among the pads and the grasses can reach out their muscular arms and touch only so many, they are that rife and wild. But what in this world is perfect? I bend closer and see how this one is clearly lopsided -- and that one wears an orange blight -- and this one is a glossy cheek half nibbled away -- and that one is a slumped purse full of its own unstoppable decay. Still, what I want in my life is to be willing to be dazzled -- to cast aside the weight of facts and maybe even to float a little above this difficult world. I want to believe I am looking into the white fire of a great mystery. I want to believe that the imperfections are nothing -- that the light is everything -- that it is more than the sum of each flawed blossom rising and fading. And I do.     -- from House of Light, by Mary Oliver Amazon.com	Themes   Fire   Light   Spring Blossom   Water   Recommended Books American Primitive, by Mary Oliver Blue Iris: Poems and Essays, by Mary Oliver Blue Pastures, by Mary Oliver Dream Work, by Mary Oliver God of Dirt: Mary Oliver and the Other Book of God, by Thomas W. Mann More >>
<<Previous Poem | More Poems by Mary Oliver | Next Poem >>

Commentary by Ivan M. Granger

I want to believe I am looking

into the white fire of a great mystery.

What a great couple of lines! It's both hesitant and hopeful. More than hopeful -- the words shimmer with such light and vitality that they intuit a glimpse already seen, just not yet made fully conscious. A vision already received but not yet claimed...

I love the way, at the beginning of this poem, Mary Oliver moves from the perfect world of the lilies to the difficult recognition of beauty in the scarred, "imperfect" muskrats moving among them. There is a sense of the markings of life and history upon the muskrats that the lilies can't match in their symmetry. Yet clearly there is suffering there too.

Do we live in that suffering or do we float a little above it? Maybe we do both.

There is something deeply self-forgiving in the vision she gives us here.

I want to believe that the imperfections are nothing --
that the light is everything -- that it is more than the sum
of each flawed blossom rising and fading. And I do.

Ivan M. Granger's original poetry, stories and commentaries are Copyright © 2002 - 2011 by Ivan M. Granger.
All other material is copyrighted by the respective authors, translators and/or publishers.