*THE WORLD AS IT COULD BE*

FIVE A.M. IN THE PINE WOODS

I’d seen their hoof prints in the deep needles

and knew they ended the long night
under the pines,

walking like two mute and beautiful women

toward the deeper woods,

so I got up in the dark and went there.

They came slowly down the hill

and looked at me sitting under the blue trees,

shyly they stepped closer and stared

from under their thick lashes and even
nibbled some damp tassels of weeds.

This is not a poem about a dream, though it could be.
This is a poem about the world that is ours, or could be.

Finally one of them— I swear it!—
would have come to my arms

But the other stamped sharp hoof in the pine needles

like the tap of sanity,and they went off together

through the trees.

When I woke I was alone,

I was thinking:

So this is how you swim inward,

So this is how you flow outward

So this is how you pray.

Mary Oliver, House of LightBeacon Press, Boston (1962)

*Today is International Peace Day declared so by the United Nations

If we could only achieve this and make it be.