A Blessing (James Wright)

Sometimes luck and happenstance direct you to a gem. This poem was featured on the home page of Poets.org. I've never heard of the author, but I was immediately receptive to the poem because it mentioned a town I know in the first line. It then went on and expressed wonder at the natural world. And me, I'm a sucker for people who marvel and slow at the same types of things I do, so I read slower, knowing that I was going to like the poem.

And I like how the lines, which are so untidy, mirror the roughness and non-standard quality of the natural world. I like how the scene that is portrayed is done in such a way that I am right there with N.

I like how, when talking of the horses, N keeps referring to them as a pair and also as being so solitaire and lonely. Because that's how it always seems. You go into Nature to connect, but you go alone. You must love yourself before you can love anyone else. You write poems for an audience, but you need solitude to write them.

Ooooh! The last line! It's advice really, not just description. "Suddenly I realize/ That if I stepped out of my body I would break/Into blossom." Once you stop focusing inward great, beautiful things happen. You treat people as part of the whole they are and which you only discovered by entering Nature and learning its lessons. You love yourself and then you can form a lasting bridge to another person on Earth. You write and send out a poem so strangers can read it and understand and grow.

Favorite line: "And the eyes of those two Indian ponies/Darken with kindness."