Poetry and Fic

I read a couple of fics by nwhepcat last night. I started with Double Vision, and moved on to its prequel, Dormant Magics. I think I had read both some time ago, but I saw they were prequels to Xander's Slayers, which I haven't read, and I wondered about the "Hand of Imhotep" references in DV. So I read them both.

And-- I ran across these bits of poetry by a poet I had never encountered: Mary Oliver. Beautiful stuff, and I absolutely see how someone in prison, trying to rebuild a life and redeem herself, would gravitate to such work. The miracle is not that Faith responded to the poetry, but that she ran across them in the first place.

I always love it when I find something so beautiful in so improbable a place. Also, with poetry, I think I experience it best in small doses. Quite unlike the way it's administered in college. You should have time to savor and be changed by a phrase here or there in a poem. Not plowing through All Wordsworth or something looking for some pattern that gives you an A on your term paper.

Yes, there's a Reason I'm now a computer programmer.

Anyway, I couldn't find the poem which contained these lines:

...looking
for death,
to eat it,
to make of it the miracle:
resurrection....

But I did find this one, and it spoke to me:


When Death Comes

When death comes
like the hungry bear in autumn;
when death comes and takes all the bright coins from his purse

to buy me, and snaps the purse shut;
when death comes
like the measle-pox

when death comes
like an iceberg between the shoulder blades,

I want to step through the door full of curiosity, wondering:
what is it going to be like, that cottage of darkness?

And therefore I look upon everything
as a brotherhood and a sisterhood,
and I look upon time as no more than an idea,
and I consider eternity as another possibility,

and I think of each life as a flower, as common
as a field daisy, and as singular,

and each name a comfortable music in the mouth,
tending, as all music does, toward silence,

and each body a lion of courage, and something
precious to the earth.

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.

Mary Oliver