So after I posted yesterday on Bregman two pals exchanged me poems that have hope within them for them: THE STOLEN ORANGE by Brian Patten and WHEN DEATH COMES by Mary Oliver. Here’s a few incomplete thoughts on how they’ve struck me today very much from my own perspective.

Both poems hold wonder as a talisman against inevitable darkness. In Patten’s poem a stolen orange in his pocket which feels like a ‘warm planet’ soothes awkward situations with its scent and promises spring on the most barren branches. I love the closing lines “It was a safeguard against imagining/ There was nothing bright or special in the world”. It reminds me both of how much of our realities is the product of our own thoughts but also how essential the symbols of hope/ rebirth/ beauty are even in the dark days.

Mary Oliver’s poem imagines her meeting with death. But rather than meet it with fear, she meets it with curiosity and wondering. In order to achieve this, she writes, she embraces the connectivity of everything and possibility – she recognises the limitations of her own understanding and settles into amazement. I think it’s a breathtaking poem.

"When it's over, I want to say all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms. 

When it's over, I don't want to wonder
if I have made of my life something particular, and real. 

I don't want to find myself sighing and frightened, 
or full of argument

I don't want to end up simply having visited this world."  

It makes me reflect on my privilege and my markers for success and how embroiled I feel in a system that doesn’t liberate me (or I find myself unable to liberate myself from) and certainly doesn’t liberate most to properly embrace this connectivity. She captures the preciousness of our individuality and the collective power of our insignificance. She pans us out into the biggest of pictures and then back into the core of our hearts. She calls us back to the meaning of our community with one another. And yet, within in the writing – the desire expressed in the ‘I don’t want” she also expresses the struggle to do so. The constant, daily endeavour, the work, of finding hope: of approaching all things with curiosity, wonder and joy.