Red Bird
书名：Red Bird
作者：Mary Oliver
[1]
Something came up
out of the dark.
It wasn’t anything I had ever seen before.
It wasn’t an animal
or a flower,
unless it was both.
Something came up out of the water,
a head the size of a cat
but muddy and without ears.
I don’t know what God is.
I don’t know what death is.
But I believe they have between them
some fervent and necessary arrangement.
[2]
On the first day of snow, when the white curtain of winter
began to stream down,
the house where I lived grew distant
and at first it seemed imperative to hurry home.
But later, not much later, I began to see
that soft snowbound house as I would always remember it,
and I would linger a long time in the pasture,
turning in circles, staring
at all the crisp, exciting, snow-filled roads
that led away.
[3]
The way the plovers cry goodbye.
The way the dead fox keeps on looking down the hill
with open eye.
The way the leaves fall, and then there’s the long wait.
The way someone says: we must never meet again.
The way mold spots the cake,
the way sourness overtakes the cream.
The way the river water rushes by, never to return.
The way the days go by, never to return.
The way somebody comes back, but only in a dream.
[4]
Yet maybe the thrush, who sings
by himself, at the edge of the green woods,
to each of us
out of his mortal body, his own feathered limits,
of every estrangement, exile, rejection—their
death-dealing weight.
And then, so sweetly, of every goodness also to be remembered.
[5]
I am the one
who took your hand
when you offered it to me.
I am the pledge of emptiness
that turned around.
Even the trees smiled.
评论