Composition idea and quote excerpt inspired by the American poet, Mary Oliver. The poem is titled “Five A.M. in the Pinewoods”, and it’s beautiful. Here it is in its entirety:
Five A.M. In the Pinewoods by Mary Oliver
I’d seen their hoofprints in the deep needles and knew they ended the long night
under the pines, walking like two mute and beautiful women toward the deeper woods, so I
got up in the dark and went there. They came slowly down the hill and looked at me sitting under
the blue trees, shyly they stepped closer and stared from under their thick lashes and even
nibbled some damp tassels of weeds. This is not a poem about a dream, though it could be.
This is a poem about the world that is ours, or could be. Finally one of them—I swear it!—
would have come to my arms. But the other stamped sharp hoof in the pine needles like
the tap of sanity, and they went off together through the trees. When I woke I was alone,
I was thinking: so this is how you swim inward, so this is how you flow outward, so this is how you pray.
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