Welcome back to The Daily Poem here on the Close Reeds Podcast Network. I'm David Kern.

Today's poem is by Mary Oliver, who, as you know, died earlier this year back in January.

She died at the age of 83. She lived from 1935 to 2019. She won the National Book Award in the

Pulitzer Prize and is known as the best-selling

American poet, at least in recent decades. Today's poem is called, quite simply, and appropriately,

spring. It goes like this. Somewhere, a black bear has just risen from sleep "'and is staring down the mountain.

"'All night in the brisk and shallow restlessness of early spring,

"'I think of her.

"'Her four black fists flicking the gravel,

"'her tongue like a red fire touching the grass, the cold water.

"'There is only one question. How to love this world. I think

of her rising like a black and leafy ledge to sharpen her claws against the silence of the trees.

Whatever else my life is, with its poems and its music and its glass cities,

it is also this dazzling darkness coming down the mountain, breathing and tasting.

All day I think of her, her white teeth, her wordlessness, her perfect love.

I have this poem from an anthology, and I was searching to see if she had other poems that

were related to this one. And I actually noticed that she has several poems just with the title

Spring. So I will post an image of this poem on the Close Reeds podcast Instagram page

at Close Reeds Pods on Instagram.

If you want to see a picture of it, if you want to see what it looks like.

But that got me thinking, it's not surprising that a poet like Mary Oliver would spend a lot of time

thinking about the poetry of spring.

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