Wild and Precious

Dear Mary, 

You have inspired so many with your wild and precious poetry. Here is a poem I wrote for you.

Sandspur

For Mary Oliver

This fresh sandspur is light green like Japanese tea. It dares you to touch it, feel the tiny spines that swirl out like planets in a galaxy, pressed into the mother sun. The tips are sharp as shards of glass and small enough to worm though fingerprints. So much work to protect a seed for a plant that nobody wants. But it doesn’t matter. You can hold the all of it between index finger and thumb, lightly, the spines tickling the edges of your fingers. And though you could close your grip on the little star of pain, you don’t. Instead, you lift it up to the sun, one eye closed, the other peering through the prickly burrs into the green world of what it wants to be. Tell me, what do you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?

Diane Mooney