Trilliums*

Every spring
among

the ambiguities
of childhood

the hillsides grew white
with the wild trilliums.
I believe in the world.
Oh, I wanted

to be easy
in the peopled kingdoms,
to take my place there,
but there was none

that I could find
shaped like me.
So I entered
through the tender buds,

I crossed the cold creek,
my backbone
and my thin white shoulders
unfolding and stretching.

From the time of snow-melt,
when the creek roared
and the mud slid
and the seeds cracked,

I listened to the earth-talk,
the root-wrangle,
the arguments of energy,
the dreams of lying

just under the surface,
then rising,
becoming
at the last moment

flaring and luminous--
the patient parable
of every spring and hillside
year after difficult year.


* in Dreamworks (1986), Mary Oliver