A Thousand Mornings

by Mary Oliver

Then a wren in the privet began to sing. He was positively drenched in enthusiasm, I don’t know why. And yet, why not.

But I thought, of the wren’s singing, what could this be if it isn’t a prayer?

And I am in that delicious and important place, roaring with laughter, full of earth-praise.

For a while I could not remember some word I was in need of, and I was bereaved and said: where are you, beloved friend?

POEM OF THE 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 a part of everything else which thought made me feel for a little while quite beautiful myself.

For some things there are no wrong seasons. Which is what I dream of for me.

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.

When a man says he hears angels singing he hears angels singing. When a man says he hears angels singing, he hears angels singing.

And Isuggest them to you also, that your spirit grow in curiosity, that your life be richer than it is, that you bow to the earth as you feel how it actually is, that we—so clever, and ambitious, and selfish, and unrestrained— are only one design of the moving, the vivacious many.

A THOUSAND MORNINGS All night my heart makes its way however it can over the rough ground of uncertainties, but only until night meets and then is overwhelmed by morning, the light deepening, the wind easing and just waiting, as I too wait (and when have I ever been disappointed?) for redbird to sing.

My body says: let me up and out, I want to fondle those soft white flowers, open in the night.

The child that was myself, that kept running away to the also running creek, to colt’s foot and trilliams, to the effortless prattle of the birds.

Also the words of poets a hundred or hundreds of years dead— their words that would not be held back.

Oh the house of denial has thick walls and very small windows and whoever lives there, little by little, will turn to stone.

It’s impossible not to remember wild and want it back.

if someday you can’t find me you might look into that tree or—of course it’s possible—under it.

I don’t need to name the countries, ours among them. What keeps us from falling down, our faces to the ground; ashamed, ashamed?

ON TRAVELING TO BEAUTIFUL PLACES Every day I’m still looking for God and I’m still finding him everywhere, in the dust, in the flowerbeds. Certainly in the oceans, in the islands that lay in the distance continents of ice, countries of sand each with its own set of creatures and God, by whatever name. How perfect to be aboard a ship with maybe a hundred years still in my pocket. But it’s late, for all of us, and in truth the only ship there is is the ship we are all on burning the world as we go.

THE MAN WHO HAS MANY ANSWERS The man who has many answers is often found in the theaters of information where he offers, graciously, his deep findings. While the man who has only questions, to comfort himself, makes music.