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# Pink Moon – The Pond
- URL: https://poetry101.love/pink-moon-the-pond/
- Published: 2023-04-05T03:02:30.000Z
- Updated: 2023-04-05T03:02:30.000Z
- Description: by Mary Oliver
- Author: Melissa Anderson
- Tags: Mary Oliver, #Import 2026-11-04 19:11

You think it will never happen again.  
Then, one night in April,  
the tribes wake trilling.  
You walk down to the shore.  
Your coming stills them,  
but little by little the silence lifts  
until song is everywhere  
and your soul rises from your bones  
and strides out over the water.  
It is a crazy thing to do –  
for no one can live like that,  
floating around in the darkness  
over the gauzy water.  
Left on the shore your bones  
keep shouting come back!  
But your soul won’t listen;  
in the distance it is sparkling  
like hot wires. So,  
like a good friend,  
you decide to follow.  
You step off the shore  
and plummet to your knees –  
you slog forward to your thighs  
and sink to your cheekbones –  
and now you are caught  
by the cold chains of the water –  
you are vanishing while around you  
the frogs continue to sing, driving  
their music upward through your own throat,  
not even noticing  
you are someone else.  
And that’s when it happens –  
you see everything  
through their eyes,  
their joy, their necessity;  
you wear their webbed fingers;  
your throat swells.  
And that's when you know  
you will live whether you will or not,  
one way or another,  
because everything is everything else,  
one long muscle.  
It’s no more mysterious than that.  
So you relax, you don’t fight it anymore,  
the darkness coming down  
called water,  
called spring,  
called the green leaf, called  
a woman’s body  
as it turns into mud and leaves,  
as it beats in its cage of water,  
as it turns like a lonely spindle  
in the moonlight, as it says  
yes.

---

Oliver, Mary. [Dream Work](https://www.google.com/books/edition/Dream%5FWork/R1HTBQAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=0&kptab=getbook&ref=poetry101.love). United States, Grove Atlantic, 2014.