In Blackwater Woods - Mary Oliver

"Look, the trees
are turning
their own bodies
into pillars

of light,
are giving off the rich
fragrance of cinnamon
and fulfillment,

the long tapers
of cattails
are bursting and floating away over
the blue shoulders

of the ponds,
and every pond,
no matter what its
name is, is

nameless now.
Every year
everything
I have ever learned

in my lifetime
leads back to this: the fires
and the black river of loss
whose other side

is salvation,
whose meaning
none of us will ever know.
To live in this world

you must be able
to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it

against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go.

A Rare Bee - Carol Ann Duffy,

I heard tell of a tale of a rare bee,
kept in a hive in the soul of a wood
by a hermit – hairshirt, heart long hurt -
and that this bee made honey so pure,
when pressed to the pout of a poet
it made her profound, or if smeared
on the smile of a singer it sweetened his sound;
or when eased on the eyes of an artist,
Pablo Picasso lived and breathed;
so I saddled my steed.

No birds sang in the branches over my head,
though I saw the wreaths of empty nests
on the ground as I rode – girl, poet, knight -
darker into the trees where the white hart
was less than a ghost or a thought, was as light
as the written word; legend. But wasn’t going, gone,
I mused, from the land, or the sky, or the sea?
I dismounted my bony horse to walk;
out of the silence
I fancied I heard the bronze buzz of a bee.

So I came to kneel at the hermit’s hive -
a little church, a tiny mosque – in a mute glade
where the loner muttered and prayed, blind
as the sun, and saw with my open eyes
one bee dance alone on the air.
I uttered my prayer: Give me your honey,
bless my tongue with rhyme, poetry, song.
It flew at my mouth and stung.
Then the terrible tune of the hermit’s grief.
Then a gesturing, dying bee
on the bier of a leaf.

Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening - Robert Frost

Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.

My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.

He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound's the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep.
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.

Read more: http://www.inspirational-poems.net/famous-nature-poems/130-stopping-by-woods-on-a-snowy-evening#ixzz173yNZ6Vu

I Heard a Bird Sing - by Oliver Herford

I heard a bird sing
In the night of December
A magical thing
And sweet to remember.

"We are nearer to Spring

Than we were in September,"
I heard a bird sing
In the dark of December.