Thursday, July 26, 2018

Thursday Poem - When I Am Wise

When I am wise in the speech of grass,
I forget the sound of words
and walk into the bottomland
and lie with my head on the ground
and listen to what grass tells me
about small places for wind to sing,
about the labor of insects,
about shadows dank with spice,
and the friendliness of weeds.

When I am wise in the dance of grass,
I forget the name and run
into the rippling bottomland
and lean against the silence which flows
out of the crumpled mountains
and rises through slick blades, pods,
wheat stems, and curly shoots,
and is carried by wind for miles
from my outstretched hands.

Mary Gray
from Wild Song: Poems of the Natural World

3 comments:

Yorkshire Pudding said...

Thanks for sharing this poem. I liked it very much though it is perhaps somewhat ironic that Mary Gray uses poetic words to consider wordlessness in Nature.

Tabor said...

Lovely and makes me wish I had that magic over words.

thelma said...

Beautiful, and I would use another word evocative.