First Snow.
Hummingbird Featured Poem. First Snow
By Mary Oliver
The snow
began here
this morning and all day
continued, its white
rhetoric everywhere
calling us back to why, how,
whence such beauty and what
the meaning—such
an oracular fever!—flowing
past windows, an energy it seemed
would never ebb, never settle
less than lovely! And only now,
deep into night,
it has finally ended.
The silence
is immense,
and the heavens still hold
a million candles—nowhere
the familiar things:
stars, the moon,
the darkness we expect
and nightly turn from. Trees
glitter like castles
of ribbons, the broad fields
smolder with light, a passing
creekbed lies
heaped with shining hills;
and though the questions
that have assailed us all day
remain—not a single
answer has been found—
walking out now
into the silence and the light
under the trees,
and through the fields,
feels like one.
Curator’s Note: In an Apple Podcast, the intro to the reading of First Snow as its Daily Poem selection, states, “Today’s poem was too topical to pass up. Like so many of Oliver’s poems, it is an invitation to attend closely to life’s unexpected gifts.”
Indeed, the beauty and “awesomeness” of nature is the essence, and quite possibly the answer to, well… everything. Our cue to tune in, and out, respectively!
Mary Oliver is one of our most beloved poets, and she uses nature imagery in almost all her poems to convey her message. Oliver has won the Pulitzer and the National Book Award for her work. First Snow was first published in the New Yorker in 1981.
