Poem of the Week: After rain

Bearded Iris After Rain, 2006

In the garden at my old house, these iris are just waking up; I won’t see them in bloom this year, but it’s enough to know they’re there. I feel that way about nature in general: it is an immense comfort to know it is there. Even under the black tar-seal of an airport runway, there are fossils, and soil, and long-dormant seeds and spores that will probably outlive us all. Bless them.

“Lingering in Happiness”
Mary Oliver, Why I Wake Early: New Poems

After rain after many days without rain,
it stays cool, private and cleansed, under the trees,
and the dampness there, married now to gravity,
falls branch to branch, leaf to leaf, down to the ground

where it will disappear—but not, of course, vanish
except to our eyes. The roots of the oaks, will have their share,
and the white threads of the grasses, and the cushion of moss;
a few drops, round as pearls, will enter the mole’s tunnel;

and soon so many small stones, buried for a thousand years,
will feel themselves being touched.