a little homesick

Yesterday I lay in the grassy courtyard of my apartment building, sweating under a sweltering summer sun. I'd risen and done my chores and then wanted nothing more than to lay in the sun like a cat, stretching and sunning myself, napping too perhaps. I read. Then I closed my eyes and missed the Farm. I pretended that the sound of honking horns and cars speeding by were lowing cows and rumbling tractors; the dry grass underneath me became a soft Farm field; the squirrels' chatter and birds' whistles made it more plausible. And yet I wasn't very far from the Farm, in the knowing that we were both under that same hot sun..and somehow that made it all right.

"The Sun"

Have you ever seen

anything

in your life

more wonderful

than the way the sun,

every evening,

relaxed and easy,

floats toward the horizon

and into the clouds or the hills,

or the rumpled sea,

and is gone--

and how it slides again

out of the blackness,

every morning,

on the other side of the world,

like a red flower

streaming upward on its heavenly oils,

say, on a morning in early summer,

at its perfect imperial distance--

and have you ever felt for anything

such wild love--

do you think there is anywhere, in any language,

a word billowing enough

for the pleasure

that fills you,

as the sun

reaches out,

as it warms you

as you stand there,

empty-handed--

or have you too

turned from this world--

or have you too

gone crazy

for power,

for things? --Mary Oliver