Today

By Billy Collins, US Poet Laureate 2001-2003

If ever there were a spring day so perfect, 

so uplifted by a warm intermittent breeze

that it made you want to throw 

open all the windows in the house

and unlatch the door to the canary's cage, 

indeed, rip the little door from its jamb,

a day when the cool brick paths 

and the garden bursting with peonies

seemed so etched in sunlight

that you felt like taking

a hammer to the glass paperweight 

on the living room end table,

releasing the inhabitants 

from their snow-covered cottage

so they could walk out, 

holding hands and squinting

into this larger dome of blue and white, 

well, today is just that kind of day.

[Published April 2000 in Poetry magazine]

Spring

By Mary Oliver

Somewhere
a black bear
has just risen from sleep
and is staring

down the mountain.
All night
in the brisk and shallow restlessness
of early spring

I think of her,
her four black fists
flicking the gravel,
her tongue

like a red fire
touching the grass,
the cold water.
There is only one question:

how to love this world.
I think of her
rising
like a black and leafy ledge

to sharpen her claws against
the silence
of the trees.
Whatever else

my life is
with its poems
and its music
and its glass cities,

it is also this dazzling darkness
coming
down the mountain,
breathing and tasting;

all day I think of her —
her white teeth,
her wordlessness,
her perfect love.