Blazing Lilies, a Prayer Heard & Answered

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Easter Sunday

It has been a tradition with this blog to share a Mary Oliver poem each Easter. I didn’t realize, when I first started doing it, that a number of Oliver’s poems are actually modeled on the Resurrection story, which explains why I have found them so appropriate.

Occasionally thorns enter into the drama, an allusion to the crown of thorns the Romans soldiers used to torment Christ. For Oliver, the thorns often function as metaphors for her depression, which weighs her down and cuts her off from the ecstatic connection with the divine that she seeks. In “Egrets,” for instance, Oliver describes her own road to Calvary as follows:

Where the path closed
   down and over,
      through the scumbled leaves,
         fallen branches,

through the knotted catbrier,
   I kept going. Finally
      I could not
         save my arms
            from thorns; soon

the mosquitoes
   smelled me, hot
      and wounded, and came
         wheeling and whining.

After such travail, however, comes the dawn, along with three egrets that “opened their wings softly and stepped over every dark thing.”

I like “Morning Poem,” today’s lyric, because it suggests that the resurrection occurs daily, not only once in the past and once in the future. I am with those who believe that Jesus saw us building God’s kingdom on earth in the present. Therefore, even though the poet carries a thorn with her at all times—”it’s all you can do to keep on trudging”—she also knows that “somewhere deep within you” is “a beast shouting that the earth/ is exactly what it wanted.” After all, on this earth “[e]very morning/ the world/ is created” and  “each pond with its blazing lilies/ is a prayer heard and answered.”

This occurs “whether or not/ you have ever dared to be happy.” But if you’re willing to pray—which is say, if you’re willing to open yourself to God’s world—then you will be rewarded with a profound happiness. Which is to say, “Thy kingdom come.”

Morning Poem
By Mary Oliver

Every morning
the world
is created.
Under the orange

sticks of the sun
the heaped
ashes of the night
turn into leaves again

and fasten themselves to the high branches–
and the ponds appear
like black cloth
on which are painted islands

of summer lilies.
If it is your nature
to be happy
you will swim away along the soft trails

for hours, your imagination
alighting everywhere.
And if your spirit
carries within it

the thorn
that is heavier than lead–
if it’s all you can do
to keep on trudging–

there is still
somewhere deep within you
a beast shouting that the earth
is exactly what it wanted–

each pond with its blazing lilies
is a prayer heard and answered
lavishly,
every morning,

whether or not
you have ever dared to be happy,
whether or not
you have ever dared to pray.