I fell into the water,
And now I'm free.
By Mary Oliver
Every spring
among
the ambiguities
of childhood
the hillsides grew white
with the wild trilliums.
I believed in the world.
Oh, I wanted
to be easy
in the peopled kingdoms,
to take my place there,
but there was none
that I could find
shaped like me.
So I entered
through the tender buds,
I crossed the cold creek,
my backbone
and my thin white shoulders
unfolding and stretching.
From the time of snow-melt,
when the creek roared
and the mud slid
and the seeds cracked,
I listened to the earth-talk.
the root-wrangle,
the arguments of energy,
the dreams lying
just under the surface,
the rising,
becoming
at the last moment
flaring and luminous -
the patient parable
of every spring and hillside
year after difficult year.
by Mary Oliver
Some kind of relaxed and beautiful thing
kept flickering in with the tide
and looking around.
Black as a fisherman’s boot,
with a white belly.If you asked for a picture I would have to draw a smile
under the perfectly round eyes and above the chin,
which was rough
as a thousand sharpened nails.And you know
what a smile means,
don’t you?I wanted
the past to go away, I wanted
to leave it, like another country; I wanted
my life to close, and open
like a hinge, like a wing, like the part of the song
where it falls
down over the rocks: an explosion, a discovery;
I wanted
to hurry into the work of my life; I wanted to know,
whoever I was, I wasalive
for a little while.It was evening, and no longer summer.
Three small fish, I don’t know what they were,
huddled in the highest ripples
as it came swimming in again, effortless, the whole body
one gesture, one black sleeve
that could fit easily around
the bodies of three small fish.Also I wanted
to be able to love. And we all know
how that one goes,
don’t we?Slowly
the dogfish tore open the soft basins of water.
You don’t want to hear the story
of my life, and anyway
I don’t want to tell it, I want to listento the enormous waterfalls of the sun.
And anyway it’s the same old story–
a few people just trying,
one way or another,
to survive.Mostly, I want to be kind.
And nobody, of course, is kind,
or mean,
for a simple reason.And nobody gets out of it, having to
swim through the fires to stay in
this world.And look! look! look! I think those little fish
better wake up and dash themselves away
from the hopeless future that is
bulging toward them.And probably,
if they don’t waste time
looking for an easier world,they can do it.
I hope this email finds you calm.
I hope this email finds you unflustered about your inbox.
I hope this email finds you in a state of acceptance that this email isn’t exactly important in the cosmic scheme of things.
I hope this email finds your work happily unfinished.
I hope this email finds you beneath a beautiful sky with the wind tenderly caressing your hair like an invisible mother.
I hope this email finds you lying on a beach, or maybe beside a lake.
I hope this email finds you with the sunlight on your face.
I hope this email finds you eating some blissfully sweet grapes.
I hope this email finds you well but, you know what, it is okay if it doesn’t we all have bad days.
I hope this email finds you reading a really good poem or something else that requires no direct response from you.
I hope this email finds you far away from this email
Matt Haig: The Comfort Book
32
Nagymaros II.
Nagymaros I.
beginning - ending (2020-2021)
Gilbert: Do you feel that is has been hard for you to be a writer and, at the same time, fulfill your obligations to your family? Have you found it hard to devote your energies to raising children and to writing?
Le Guin: Well, yes. There are times, like when I read about Lady Antonia Fraser, with her big books and her five children and fifteen nursemaids or whatever it is, that I feel a profound and evil envy. Or when I hear about some man who has quit a paying job to “devote himself to writing full time"—I get mean. I think, oh buddy. I wrote when I had jobs I got paid for; when I quit those, I still had a fulltime job, the kids and the house, and I still wrote. Who is doing your work for you, Mr. Fulltime Writer? Mrs. Fulltime Writer? And where are her novels? But all this is mean, as I said. The fact is, I’m married to a man who has twenty-four years ungrudgingly shared the work: the kids, the house, the whole schmeer. Two people can do three fulltime jobs—teaching, writing and family. And when pressed I will admit that I think this sort of sharing arrangement is better, though much more tiring, than fifteen nursemaids, or than hiring help in any way. If I was "free”, as so many male writers have been free, I would be impoverished. Why should all my time be my own, just because I write books? There are human responsibilities, and those include responsibilities to daily life, to common human work. I mean, clearning up, cooking, all the work that must be done over and over all one’s life, and also the school concert and the impossible geometry homework and so on. Responsibility is privilege. If you delegate that work to others, you’ve copped out of the very souce of your writing, which after all is life, isn’t it, just living, people living and working and trying to get along. Well, anyhow, so you get the others off to their work, at school or college, and you shut the door on the grotty kitchen and you sit down at your desk and do your work for a while. Or anyhow you sit there and stare and wish you were doing it. An awful lot of writing seems to be sitting and staring.
"
Szomolya, 2020