Nature's Poetry

White Owl,  yahoo/NYT photo image. They look so soft and lovely. 

When I read fantastic stories about the wonders of nature, like the recent rare phenomenon of flocks of white owls flying further south than usual across the US, or see photos of our earth and planets taken by Voyager or other intrepid spacecraft sent from earth decades ago, I am mesmerized.  Enthralled. 

       I absorb the news with a stunned reverence for the natural beauty that surrounds us.  I wish I could write about it like poet Mary Oliver, whose poems make nature's bounty--a flock of geese, white owls, black bears, mountains, rivers,and wild flowers--come alive in our very being and way of seeing.  My cousin Leo’s wife Kathy noted, when she sent me Oliver’s poetry in Ukraine, “Oliver is so gifted at illuminating the universal truths in small particulars—especially particulars of nature.”   Here’s an Oliver poem that came to mind when I read about those beautiful white Owls venturing further South than normal:

Snow Geese by Mary Oliver (New & Selected Poems, Vol.2  Beacon, 2005)

Oh, to love what is lovely, and will not last!  

   What a task

      To ask

Of anything, or anyone,

Yet it is ours,

   And not by the century or the year, but by the hours.

One fall day I  heard

    Above me, and above the sting of the wind, a sound

I did not know, and my look shot upward; it was

A flock of snow geese, winging it

     Faster than the ones we usually see,

And, being the color of snow, catching the sun

So they were, in part at least, golden.  I 

Held my breath

As we do

Sometimes

To stop time

When something wonderful

Has touched us

As with a match

Which is lit, and bright,

But does not hurt

In the common way,

But delightfully

As if delight

Were the most serious thing

You ever felt.

The geese

flew on.

I have never seen them again.

Maybe I will, someday, somewhere.

Maybe I won’t.

It doesn’t matter.

What matters

Is that, when I saw them,

I saw them

As through the veil, secretly, joyfully, clearly.

For news story on the White Owls, Jim Robbins in the NYT,  22 January 2012: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/23/science/earth/spike-in-snowy-owl-sightings-stirs-speculation-among-bird-watchers.html

Photo of White Geese flying by howardsview.com, yahoo images.