Welcome home.

To find your place in the poem we share is to find your place in the world that we share.

Your card has a number. Share with us which card you received, and where you live. How about few words of your own that capture how reading those lines makes you feel?

We all could feel a little more, we all could do with a bit more empathy, mystery, and adventure.

Challenge: Share the bit of poem you received. Or, copy the lines yourself, and leave it for someone to find. Take a photo the spot where your leave it for the next Wiggler to find, and share it with us here.

Below is the poem in its entirety:

The End of March 

Elizabeth Bishop


It was cold and windy, scarcely the day
to take a walk on that long beach.
Everything was withdrawn as far as possible,
indrawn: the tide far out, the ocean shrunken,
seabirds in ones or twos.
The rackety, icy, offshore wind
numbed our faces on one side;
disrupted the formation
of a lone flight of Canada geese;
and blew back the low, inaudible rollers
in upright, steely mist.

The sky was darker than the water
--it  was the color of mutton-fat jade.
Along the wet sand, in rubber boots, we followed
a track of big dog-prints (so big
they were more like like lion-prints). Then we came on
lengths and lengths, endless, of wet white string,
looping up to the tide line, down to the water,
over and over. Finally, they did end:
a thick white snarl, man-size, awash,
rising on every wave, a sodden ghost,
falling back, sodden, giving up the ghost....
a kite string? --But no kite.

I wanted to get as far as my proto-dream-house,

my crypto-dream-house, that crooked box
set up on pilings, shingled green,
a sort of artichoke of a house, but greener
(boiled with bicarbonate of soda?),
protected from spring tides by a palisade
of--are they railroad ties?
(Many things about this place are dubious).
I'd like to retire there and do nothing,
or nothing much, forever in two bare rooms:

look through binoculars,read boring books,
old, long, long books, and write down useless notes,
talk to myself, and, foggy days,
watch the droplets slipping, heavy with light.
At night, a grog a l’américaine.
I'd blaze it with a kitchen match
and lovely diaphanous blue flame
would waver, doubled in the window.
There must be a stove, there is a chimney,
askew, but braced with wires,
and electricity possibly
--at least, at the back another wire
limply leashes the whole affair
to something off behind the dunes.
A light to read by--perfect! But--impossible.
And that day the wind was much too cold
even to get that far,
and of course the house was boarded up.

On the way back our faces froze on the other side.
The sun came out for just a minute.
For just a minute, set in their bezels of sand,
the drab, damp, scattered stones
were multi-colored,
and all those high enough threw out long shadows,
individual shadows, then pulled them in again.
They could have been teasing the lion sun,
except that now he was behind them
--a sun who'd walked the beach the last low tide,
making those big, majestic paw-prints,
who perhaps had batted a kite out of the sky to play with.

One

Your spirit is mingled with mine,
as wine is with water;
whatever touches you touches me.
In all the stations of the soul you are I.

Mansur al-Hallaj (Persia, 9th century)

Today, like every other day, we wake up empty

and frightened. Don't open the door to the study

and begin reading. Take down a musical instrument.

Let the beauty we love be what we do.

There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.

Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Rumi

Tree
Jane Hirshfield

It is foolish
to let a young redwood
grow next to a house.

Even in this
one lifetime,
you will have to choose.

That great calm being,
this clutter of soup-pots and books--

Already the first branch tips brush at the window.
Softly, calmly,
immensity taps at your life.

From Wiggle 3-34

Dogfish

Some kind of relaxed and beautiful thing

kept flickering in with the tide

and looking around.

Black as a fisherman's boot,

with a white belly.

If you asked for a picture I would have to draw a smile

under the perfectly round eyes and above the chin,

which was rough

as a thousand sharpened nails.

And you know

what a smile means,

don't you?

I wanted

the past to go away, I wanted

to leave it, like another country; I wanted

my life to close, and open

like a hinge, like a wing, like the part of the song

where it falls

down over the rocks: an erosion, a discovery;

I wanted

to hurry into the work of my life; I wanted to know,

whoever I was, I was

alive

for a little while.

It was evening, and no longer summer.

Three small fish, I don't know what they were,

huddled in the highest ripples

as it came swimming in again, effortless, the whole body

one gesture, one black sleeve

that could fit easily around

the bones of three small fish.

Also I wanted

to be able to love. And we all know

how that one goes,

don't we?

Mary Oliver

From Wiggle 3-34

Slowly

The dogfish tore open the soft basins of water.

You don't want to hear the story

of my life, and anyway

I don't want to tell it, I want to listen

to the enormous waterfalls of the sun.

And anyway it's the same old story

a few people just trying,

one way or another,

to survive.

Mostly, I want to be kind.

And nobody, of course, is kind,

or mean,

for a simple reason.

And nobody gets out of it, having to

swim through the fires to stay in

this world.

And look! Look! Look! I think those little fish

better wake up and dash themselves away

from the hopeless future that is

bulging toward them.

And probably,

if they don't waste time

looking for an easier world,

they can do it.

Mary Oliver