Showing posts with label mary oliver. Show all posts
Showing posts with label mary oliver. Show all posts

Monday, March 4, 2024

poem of one world

 




This morning
the beautiful white heron
was floating along above the water

and then into the sky of this
the one world
we all belong to

where everything
sooner or later
is part of everything else

which thought made me feel
for a little while
quite beautiful myself.



~ Mary Oliver
from A Thousand Mornings: Poems
photo by  Ilan Horn
with thanks to Intrinsic Heart



Friday, November 10, 2023

Yes! No!









How necessary it is to have opinions! I think the spotted trout
lilies are satisfied, standing a few inches above the earth. I
think serenity is not something you just find in the world,
like a plum tree, holding up its white petals.

The violets, along the river, are opening their blue faces, like
small dark lanterns.

The green mosses, being so many, are as good as brawny.

How important it is to walk along, not in haste but slowly,
looking at everything and calling out

Yes! No! The

swan, for all his pomp, his robes of grass and petals, wants
only to be allowed to live on the nameless pond. The catbrier
is without fault. The water thrushes, down among the sloppy
rocks, are going crazy with happiness. Imagination is better
than a sharp instrument. To pay attention, this is our endless
and proper work.
 
 
 ~ Mary Oliver
from White Pine: Poems and Prose Poems
with thanks to Poetry Chaikhana



 
 

no word for “war”






Trying to explain it to them
Leaves one feeling ridiculous and obscene.
Their houses, like white bowls,
Sit on a prairie of ancient snowfalls
Caught beyond thaw or the swift changes
Of night and day.
They listen politely, and stride away.

With spears and sleds and barking dogs
To hunt for food. The women wait
Chewing on skins or singing songs,
Knowing that they have hours to spend,
That the luck of the hunter is often late.

Later, by fires and boiling bones
In streaming kettles, they welcome me,
Far kin, pale brother,
To share what they have in a hungry time
In a difficult land. While I talk on
Of the southern kingdoms, cannon, armies,
Shifting alliances, airplanes, power,
They chew their bones, and smile at one another.



~ Mary Oliver

Friday, May 27, 2022

thousands of voices

 
 
 

 
 
 Do you bow your head when you pray or do you look
up into that blue space?

Take your choice, prayers fly from all directions.
And don't worry about what language you use,
God no doubt understands them all.

Even when the swans are flying north and making
such a ruckus of noise, God is surely listening
and understanding.

Rumi said, There is no proof of the soul.
But isn't the return of spring and how it
springs up in our hearts a pretty good hint?
Yes, I know, God's silence never breaks, but is
that really a problem?

There are thousands of voices, after all.
And furthermore, don't you imagine (I just suggest it)
that the swans know about as much as we do about
the whole business?

So listen to them and watch them, singing as they fly.
Take from it what you can.




~ Mary Oliver
from  Devotions: The Selected Poems 
 
 

Saturday, June 26, 2021

for one thing leads to another

 
 
 

 
 
 Will the hungry ox stand in the field and not eat
of the sweet grass?
Will the owl bite off its own wings?
Will the lark forget to lift its body in the air or
forget to sing?
Will the rivers run upstream?

Behold, I say - behold
the reliability and the finery and the teachings
of this gritty earth gift.


2.
Eat bread and understand comfort.
Drink water, and understand delight.
Visit the garden where the scarlet trumpets
are opening their bodies for the hummingbirds
who are drinking the sweetness, who are
thrillingly gluttonous.

For one thing leads to another.
Soon you will notice how stones shine underfoot.
Eventually tides will be the only calendar you believe in.

And someone's face, whom you love, will be as a star
both intimate and ultimate,
and you will be both heart-shaken and respectful.

And you will hear the air itself, like a beloved, whisper:
oh, let me, for a while longer, enter the two
beautiful bodies of your lungs.


3.
The witchery of living
is my whole conversation
with you, my darlings
All I can tell you is what I know.

Look, and look again.
This world is not just a little thrill for the eyes.

It's more than bones.
It's more than the delicate wrist with its personal pulse.
It's more than the beating of the single heart.
It's praising.
It's giving until the giving feels like receiving.
You have a life - just imagine that!
You have this day, and maybe another, and maybe
still another.


4.
Someday I am going to ask my friend Paulus,
the dancer, the potter,
to make me a begging bowl
which I believe
my soul needs.

And if I come to you,
to the door of your comfortable house
with unwashed clothes and unclean fingernails,
will you put something into it?

I would like to take this chance.
I would like to give you this chance.


5.
We do one thing or another; we stay the same, or we
change.
Congratulations, if
you have changed.


6.
Let me ask you this.
Do you think that beauty exists for some
fabulous reason?

And, if you have not been enchanted by this adventure -
your life -
what would do for you?


7.
What I loved in the beginning, I think, was mostly myself.
Never mind that I had to, since somebody had to.
That was many years ago.
Since then I have gone out from my confinements,
though with difficulty.

I mean the ones that thought to rule my heart.
I cast them out, I put them on the mush pile.
They will be nourishment somehow (everything is nourishment
somehow or another.)

And I have become the child of clouds, and of hope.
I have become the friend of the enemy, whoever that is.
I have become older and, cherishing what I have learned,
I have become younger.

And what do I risk to tell you this, which is all I know?
Love yourself. Then forget it. Then, love the world.






Mary Oliver
from Evidence
art by Corinna Button
 with thanks to being silently drawn

 

 
 

Monday, January 25, 2021

sleeping in the forest

.
I thought the earth
remembered me, she
took me back so tenderly, arranging
her dark skirts, her pockets
full of lichens and seeds. I slept
as never before, a stone
on the riverbed, nothing
between me and the white fire of the stars
but my thoughts, and they floated
light as moths among the branches
of the perfect trees. All night
I heard the small kingdoms breathing
around me, the insects, and the birds
who do their work in the darkness.  All night
I rose and fell, as if in water, grappling
with a luminous doom.  By morning
I had vanished at least a dozen times
into something better.
.
~ Mary Oliver


.

Thursday, December 3, 2020

as we have loved

 
 
 


 

Over the local stations, one by one,
Announcers list disasters like dark poems
That always happen in the skull of winter.
But once again the storm has passed us by:
Lovely and moderate, the snow lies down
While shouting children hurry back to play,
And scarved and smiling citizens once more
Sweep down their easy paths of pride and welcome.

And what else might we do? Let us be truthful.
Two counties north the storm has taken lives.
Two counties north, to us, is far away, -
A land of trees, a wing upon a map,
A wild place never visited, - so we
Forget with ease each far mortality.

Peacefully from our frozen yards we watch
Our children running on the mild white hills.
This is the landscape that we understand, -
And till the principle of things takes root,
How shall examples move us from our calm?
I do not say that is not a fault.
I only say, except as we have loved,
All news arrives as from a distant land. 
 
 
 
 
~ Mary Oliver
Beyond the Storm Belt from Devotions
 
 

Friday, November 6, 2020

in blackwater woods


.
 
 
 
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.
 
 
 
 
 
~ Mary Oliver
from  American Primitive
 photo by Eliot Porter
 
 

Friday, October 30, 2020

what can I say





 
 
What can I say that I have not said before? 
So I'll say it again. 
The leaf has a song in it. 
Stone is the face of patience. 
Inside the river there is an unfinishable story 
and you are somewhere in it 
and it will never end until all ends. 
 
Take your busy heart to the art museum and the 
chamber of commerce 
but take it also to the forest. 
The song you heard singing in the leaf when you 
were a child 
is singing still. 
I am of years lived, so far, seventy-four, 
and the leaf is singing still. 
 
 
 
 
~ Mary Oliver
from Swan
 
 
 

lines written in the days of growing darkness




Every year we have been
witness to it: how the
world descends

into a rich mash, in order that
it may resume.
And therefore
who would cry out

to the petals on the ground
to stay,
knowing as we must,
how the vivacity of what was is married

to the vitality of what will be?
I don't say
it's easy, but
what else will do

if the love one claims to have for the world
be true?

So let us go on, cheerfully enough,
this and every crisping day,

though the sun be swinging east,
and the ponds be cold and black,
and the sweets of the year be doomed.





~ Mary Oliver
photo by Kathleen Connally





Monday, October 19, 2020

it needs the metaphor of the body ...






The spirit
likes to dress up like this:
ten fingers,
ten toes,

shoulders, and all the rest
at night
in the black branches,
in the morning

in the blue branches
of the world.
It could float, of course,
but would rather

plumb rough matter.
Airy and shapeless thing,
it needs
the metaphor of the body,

lime and appetite,
the oceanic fluids;
it needs the body's world,
instinct

and imagination
and the dark hug of time,
sweetness
and tangibility,

to be understood,
to be more than pure light
that burns
where no one is --

so it enters us --
in the morning
shines from brute comfort
like a stitch of lightning;

and at night
lights up the deep and wondrous
drownings of the body
like a star. 




~ Mary Oliver 




Saturday, September 5, 2020

when death comes











When death comes
like the hungry bear in autumn;
when death comes and takes all the bright coins from his purse

to buy me, and snaps the purse shut;
when death comes
like the measle-pox;

when death comes
like an iceberg between the shoulder blades,

I want to step through the door full of curiosity, wondering:
what is it going to be like, that cottage of darkness?

And therefore I look upon everything
as a brotherhood and a sisterhood,
and I look upon time as no more than an idea,
and I consider eternity as another possibility,

and I think of each life as a flower, as common
as a field daisy, and as singular,

and each name a comfortable music in the mouth,
tending, as all music does, toward silence,

and each body a lion of courage, and something
precious to the earth.

When it’s over, I want to say: all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.

When it’s over, I don’t want to wonder
if I have made of my life something particular, and real.
I don’t want to find myself sighing and frightened,
or full of argument.

I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world.
 
 
 
 
~ Mary Oliver
 
 
 
 

Monday, August 31, 2020

oh what is that beautiful thing that just happened?




At Blackwater Pond the tossed waters have settled
after a night of rain.


I dip my cupped hands. I drink
a long time. It tastes

like stone, leaves, fire. It falls cold
into my body, waking the bones. I hear them

deep inside me, whispering
oh what is that beautiful thing
that just happened?








~ Mary Oliver
photo by Eliot Porter


Sunday, July 5, 2020

lines written in the days of growing darkness






Every year we have been
witness to it: how the
world descends
into a rich mash, in order that
it may resume.
And therefore
who would cry out 

to the petals on the ground
to stay,
knowing, as we must,
how the vivacity of what was is married 

to the vitality of what will be?
I don’t say
it’s easy, but
what else will do 

if the love one claims to have for the world
be true?
So let us go on 

though the sun be swinging east,
and the ponds be cold and black,
and the sweets of the year be doomed.





~ Mary Oliver
photo by Eliot Porter



Wednesday, May 13, 2020

do you have time



Oh do you have time

to linger
for just a little while
out of your busy

and very important day
for the goldfinches
that have gathered
in a field of thistles

for a musical battle,
to see who can sing
the highest note,
or the lowest,

or the most expressive of mirth,
or the most tender?
Their strong, blunt beaks
drink the air

as they strive
melodiously
not for your sake
and not for mine

and not for the sake of winning
but for sheer delight and gratitude—
believe us, they say,
it is a serious thing

just to be alive
on this fresh morning
in the broken world.
I beg of you,

do not walk by
without pausing
to attend to this
rather ridiculous performance.

It could mean something.
It could mean everything.
It could be what Rilke meant, when he wrote:

'You must change your life.'



~ Mary Oliver



Wednesday, September 25, 2019

every day






Every day
I see or hear
something
that more or less

kills me
with delight,
that leaves me
like a needle

in the haystack
of light.
It was what I was born for -
to look, to listen,

to lose myself
inside this soft world -
to instruct myself
over and over

in joy,
and acclamation.
Nor am I talking
about the exceptional,

the fearful, the dreadful,
the very extravagant - 
but of the ordinary,
the common, the very drab,

the daily presentations.
Oh, good scholar,
I say to myself,
how can you help

but grow wise
with such teachings
as these -
the untrimmable light

of the world,
the ocean's shine,
the prayers that are made
out of grass?



~ Mary Oliver
(Why I Wake Early)


Sunday, September 1, 2019

the soft animal

.






You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.

Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.

Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.

Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.

Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting--
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.



~ Mary Oliver


Friday, August 2, 2019

I worried








I worried a lot. Will the garden grow, will the rivers 
flow in the right direction, will the earth turn 
as it was taught, and if not how shall 
I correct it? 

Was I right, was I wrong, will I be forgiven, 
can I do better? 

Will I ever be able to sing, even the sparrows 
can do it and I am, well, 
hopeless. 

Is my eyesight fading or am I just imagining it, 
am I going to get rheumatism, 
lockjaw, dementia? 

Finally I saw that worrying had come to nothing. 
And gave it up. And took my old body 
and went out into the morning, 
and sang.




~ Mary Oliver
from Swan: Poems and Prose Poems



Friday, July 19, 2019

among the trees






When I am among the trees,
especially the willows and the honey locust,
equally the beech, the oaks and the pines,
they give off such hints of gladness.
I would almost say that they save me, and daily.

I am so distant from the hope of myself,
in which I have goodness, and discernment,
and never hurry through the world
but walk slowly, and bow often.

Around me the trees stir in their leaves
and call out, “Stay awhile.”
The light flows from their branches.

And they call again, “It’s simple”, they say,
“and you too have come into the world to do this,
to go easy, to be filled with light , and to shine.”





~ Mary Oliver

Thursday, July 18, 2019

last instruction







"Make of yourself a light" said the Buddha,
 before he died. I think of this 
every morning as the east begins to tear 
off its many clouds of darkness, 
to send up the first signal-a white fan 
streaked with pink and violet, even green. 

An old man, he lay down between two sala trees,
 and he might have said anything, 
knowing it was his final hour. The light burns upward,
 it thickens and settles over the fields. Around him,
 the villagers gathered and stretched forward to listen. 
Even before the sun itself hangs, disattached,
 in the blue air, I am touched everywhere
 by its ocean of yellow waves.

 No doubt he thought 
of everything that had happened in his difficult life. 
And then I feel the sun itself 
as it blazes over the hills, like a million flowers on fire- 
clearly I'm not needed, 
yet I feel myself turning into something 
of inexplicable value. Slowly, 
beneath the branches, he raised his head. 
He looked into the faces of that frightened crowd.




~  Mary Oliver