Reading Mary Oliver

Ruo Wei Lim, Singapore

I do not know

the names of flowers, for which

I am a little

devastated. I do not know

the names of trees, or birds, or rivers,

and I guess that must be

the great emptiness within me.

I do not feel

the world around me

like a warm embrace, but turned away, like

a cold shoulder. I wish to love

all this brokenness into something whole, again,

but I am only me, and I do not know

the names of the universe.

So this poem is barren. No bright flowers, no gleam

of summer.

Static, like a winter afternoon; dry, silent. Empty branches

motionless in the chilled air, almost gruesome.

Not the lilting lines of spring, dripping with honey,

sunlit.

Ruo Wei is an aspiring writer and poet from Singapore, currently a first-year undergraduate studying in the UK. In her free time, she likes thinking and theorising about the media she consumes and wants everyone to join the cause. She hopes reading and writing poetry will help her become a better dreamer.