poetry at the breakfast table

For breakfast I broiled two grapefruit halves with a smattering of turbinado sugar on top. I read from Mary Oliver while I waited for the fruit to cool. Eating the grapefruit was like having the warm taste of summer in my mouth. Little bullets of tart juice bursting on my tongue. Is grapefruit a winter season fruit? Seems to be. If so, the bitter aftertaste is just a sharp reminder that summer is yet months away.

Currently reading Mary Oliver's 'House of Light.' Mary Oliver is to poetry as Annie Dillard is to prose. I can only take them in small doses, otherwise I become lost in the density of language and so much crushing, heartbreaking beauty of nature. The inevitable resolution of predator and prey spun into macabre, yet true, ballet. And finding parallels to human nature and myself in the lines. The same wings that bring an eagle to soar with magnificence enable it to swoop to capture field mouse or rabbit to feed. It is not wrong for the eagle to take prey for sustenance or to soar with perceived grandeur. To paraphrase a Native American quote, we hold the power to both create and destroy. To deny one is to deny both, I think, and so the challenge, as a human being, is to not cause unnecessary harm.