(A Poem for) Morning

(A Poem for) Morning June 12, 2013

The thing I love most about this time of year, when the days are approaching their longest here in the northern hemisphere, is that it’s bright and sunny in the mornings, sometimes before I wake up.

And we’re about to move out of the apartment we’ve been in for the past several months, where we’ve lived with some cats, into an apartment where there won’t be cats around. So I like this poem a lot – it reminds me of how wonderful mornings can be, and how wonderful cats can be.

Morning
By Mary Oliver

Salt shining behind its glass cylinder.
Milk in a blue bowl. The yellow linoleum.
The cat stretching her black body from the pillow.
The way she makes her curvaceous response to the small, kind gesture.
Then laps the bowl clean.
Then wants to go out into the world
where she leaps lightly and for no apparent reason across the lawn,
then sits, perfectly still, in the grass.
I watch her a little while, thinking:
what more could I do with wild words?
I stand in the cold kitchen, bowing down to her.
I stand in the cold kitchen, everything wonderful around me.

 


Browse Our Archives