Secular Poem
In Blackwater Woods By Mary Oliver
Look, the trees are turning their own bodies into pillars of light, are giving off the rich fragrance of cinnamon and fulfilment The long tapers of cattails are bursting and floating away over the blue shoulders of the ponds, and every pond, no matter what it’s name is, is nameless now.
Every year everything I have ever learned in my lifetime
Leads back to this: the fires, and the black river of loss whose other side is salvation, whose meaning none of us will ever know.
To live in this world you must be able to do three things: to love what is mortal; to hold it against your bones knowing your own life depends on it; and, when the time comes to let it go
to let it go.
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