Logos

Logos
by Mary Oliver

Why wonder about the loaves and the fishes?
If you say the right words, the wine expands.
If you say them with love
and the felt ferocity of that love
and the felt necessity of that love,
the fish explode into many.
Imagine him, speaking,
and don't worry about what is reality,
or what is plain, or what is mysterious.
If you were there, it was all those things.
If you can imagine it, it is all those things.
Eat, drink, be happy.
Accept the miracle.
Accept, too, each spoken word
spoken with love.

Winds

Winds

We do not understand
the high winds on hot days.
They froth the tops of the trees into waves,
letting us drown on the stifling ocean floor,
and we glare up in righteous indignation.
The wind is conversing with the maples
and we cannot hear what they are saying.

We understand the low winds.
They were sent from heaven for our comfort.
They clothe our skin in coolness,
and we sway into them as we do
into fur coats in snowfalls.
How pleasant the weather is today, we say,
how kind of the winds to descend to us.

We understand nothing.
We do not know that the winds pay us no heed.
The high winds laugh with the forest
at the joy of the sky;
they rage at something terrible
that happened across the sea.

And when we stand in the low winds,
assuming they blow to please us,
we have no idea that we are ignorant flies
in the presence of two lovers.
For the low wind bows to greet the earth,
reminding her in the wake
of his mighty jet streams and trade winds
that he knows gentleness.
That as she spins her sphere
of jade and azure through the crystaled heavens,
he knows her dust and pebbles
as well as her seas and sky.

(c.l.)