My sister shared this poem with me. It is entitled Hurricane, and it was written by one of my favorite poets, Mary Oliver. The church my sister and I attended in college had a tradition of gifting Mary Oliver’s poetry books to students when they graduated. The beauty of poetry is that we claim its meaning for ourselves. This poem spoke to my sister. For me, it is a reminder of grace, which can be wonderful and unsettling all at once. Read the poem with an open heart– what does it mean for you today?

It didn’t behave
like anything you had
ever imagined. The wind
tore at the trees, the rain
fell for days slant and hard.
The back of the hand
to everything. I watched
the trees bow and their leaves fall
and crawl back into the earth.
As though, that was that.
This was one hurricane
I lived through, the other one
was of a different sort, and
lasted longer. Then
I felt my own leaves giving up and
falling. The back of the hand to
everything. But listen now to what happened
to the actual trees;
toward the end of that summer they
pushed new leaves from their stubbed limbs.
It was the wrong season, yes,
but they couldn’t stop. They
looked like telephone poles and didn’t
care. And after the leaves came
blossoms. For some things
there are no wrong seasons.
Which is what I dream of for me.

Mary Oliver,  A Thousand Mornings.