Tag Archives: Bear

707. Silence is exhilarating at first – as noise is – but there is a sweetness to silence outlasting exhilaration, akin to the sweetness of listening and the velvet of sleep. ~Edward Hoaglan

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Let me silent be,
For silence is the speech of love,
The music of the spheres above.
~Richard Henry Stoddard

Screen shot 2015-04-18 at 8.36.34 AMPoetic Black and White Watercolors 
of Children With Wild Animals 
by Elicia Elidanto

Spring

Somewhere
a black bear
has just risen from sleep
and is staring

down the mountain.
All night
in the brisk and shallow restlessness
of early spring

I think of her,
her four black fists
flicking the gravel,
her tongue

like a red fire
touching the grass,
the cold water.
There is only one question:

how to love this world.
I think of her
rising
like a black and leafy ledge

to sharpen her claws against
the silence
of the trees.
Whatever else

my life is
with its poems
and its music
and its glass cities,

it is also this dazzling darkness
coming
down the mountain,
breathing and tasting;

all day I think of her —
her white teeth,
her wordlessness,
her perfect love.
~Mary Oliver

…a time to tear and a time to mend, a time to be silent and a time to speak… ~Ecclesiastes 3:7   ✝

426. Crowds of grasshoppers skip at our feet… thanking the Lord for a life so sweet. ~Jean Ingelow

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I seeeeeee yoooou!
But from where did you come?
You were not into the camera’s eye at first.
Perhaps it was because my focus
was solely upon your handsome home.
But now that I have spied you,
I wonder if you’ve come into view
in fear of what I’m up to.
But you need not worry Mr. Hophopper
for I will not try to catch or harm you;
I want merely to capture your image
with the magic of my camera.
~Natalie Scarberry

DSC_0082

The Summer Day

Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean–
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down–
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
With your one wild and precious life?

~Mary Oliver

Let us come before Him with thanksgiving an extol Him with music and song. ~Psalm 95:2   ✝

Thank you, Jesus, that you save, you heal, you restore, and you reveal Your Father’s heart to us! You have captured me with grace and I’m caught in Your infinite embrace! Like Saint Hildegard Lord, may I too be a feather on your holy breath and spread, like seeds, the gospel abroad.