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

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

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 

 

 

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

 

 

 

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

.

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

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 

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

 

 

 

 

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

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

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

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)

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

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

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

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