Honey at the Table - A Mary Oliver Poem
As we reach the winter solstice, when the sun makes its shortest and lowest appearance of the year above the horizon, I find solace in a book and a comfy chair.
Mary Oliver's poem about honey struck a cord when I read it recently, how romantic to think of summer flowers and journeys captured and bottled up in honey to be released at your table. So here is her poem for you and I recommend buying yourself one of her books, it will serve you well.
Honey At The Table
by Mary Oliver
It fills you with the soft
essence of vanished flowers, it becomes
a trickle sharp as a hair that you follow
from the honey pot over the table
and out the door and over the ground,
and all the while it thickens,
grows deeper and wilder, edged
with pine boughs and wet boulders,
pawprints of bobcat and bear, until
deep in the forest you
shuffle up some tree, you rip the bark,
you float into and swallow the dripping combs,
bits of the tree, crushed bees – - – a taste
composed of everything lost, in which everything lost is found.