I've been slowly listening to the Mary Oliver interview on On Being, backing up and re-playing parts, with a growing love for her strength and ability to focus on joy.
This morning, listening and stitching, I heard her poem "Fourth Sign of the Zodiac" for the first time. It was just after choosing the thread to echo and continue the few floating blue petals in the orange middle ring cloth around the sun. How she saw and knew things most of us miss...
This is part four...
4.
Late yesterday afternoon, in the heat,
all the fragile blue flowers in bloom
in the shrubs in the yard next door had
tumbled from the shrubs and lay
wrinkled and fading in the grass. But
this morning the shrubs were full of
the blue flowers again. There wasn’t
a single one on the grass. How, I
wondered, did they roll back up to
the branches, that fiercely wanting,
as we all do, just a little more
life.
– from Blue Horses by Mary Oliver, published by Penguin Press, 2014.
