If there is such a thing as poetic license, I am certainly taking it now.  I have created what is known as a ‘found’ poem.  Up until now, this poem has not existed.  I have selected a couple of lines each from eight different poems and two different authors.  I chose Mary Oliver and Wendell Berry for this creation.  At the end of this found poem, I have cited the poems I used.

If you like to play with poetry, you can do this, too.  I found it a wonderful exercise as something to just drop the day’s events and lose myself inside the soft belly of poetry.  Enjoy…

* * *

I would like to write a poem about the world
that has in it, nothing fancy

Like our travels, our workdays
burned upon the world.

And forgetting everything I will leap to name it
as though for the first time

Turning always in my mind toward you,
your slopes, folds, gentle openings.

As a poem or a prayer, can also make
luminous any dark place on earth.

Maybe we’re necessary to each other,
and this vacant place has need of us both.

Calling us back to why, how and whence
such beauty and what the meaning.

To its joy we come together–the seer
and the seen, the eater and the eaten,
the lover and the loved.

* * *

Each verse was extracted from individual poems.  The pattern begins with Mary Oliver, then Wendell Berry and continues to alternate authors and poems throughout, ending with Wendell Berry.  The following references the poems used in the order that they appear:
Mary Oliver, This World
Wendell Berry, Horses
Mary Oliver, Tasting the Wild Grapes
Wendell Berry, Letter
Mary Oliver, May
Wendell Berry, A Music
Mary Oliver, First Snow
Wendell Berry, The Hidden Singer

It is a simple prayer that does not plead, beg or demand but already assumes it
is given.  And assumes it even perhaps in the face of no factual evidence of it.

What sort of gratitude is that?  It is the kind that is anchored in unwavering faith.
It is unwavering because it is not moved by outer appearances.  Inwardly you
have already become the one who has received and from that your gratitude wells
up naturally.  This gratitude for what has been received and faith in what is not
yet apparent to the senses becomes a spiritual union in consciousness.

At some point, it must then show up as fact in your outer experience.  It is law,
as Abraham would say.

Love, Bethie