Every Morning

Tuesday, January 21

Another, admittedly darker, poem from Mary Oliver: “Every Morning”

I read the papers,
I unfold them and examine them in the sunlight.
The way the red mortars, in photographs,
arc down into the neighborhoods
like stars, the way death
combs everything into a gray rubble before
the camera moves on. What
dark part of my soul
shivers: you don’t want to know more
about this. And then: you don’t know anything
unless you do. How the sleepers
wake and run to the cellars,
how the children scream, their tongues
trying to swim away–
how the morning itself appears
like a slow white rose
while the figures climb over the bubbled thresholds,
move among the smashed cars, the streets
where the clanging ambulances won’t
stop all day–death and death, messy death–
death as history, death as a habit–
how sometimes the camera pauses while a family
counts itself, and all of them are alive,
their mouths dry caves of wordlessness
in the smudged moons of their faces,
a craziness we have so far no name for–
all this I read in the papers,
in the sunlight,
I read with my cold, sharp eyes.

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I’m thankful a ceasefire has begun this week, at least in one part of the world. I’m unsure if it will last, or what calamities will begin next. And I hear that over one hundred people have been killed since the ceasefire was signed.

Oliver wrote this in 1986 so, clearly, some things don’t change: we’re not yet a mature society.