Devotions: The Selected Poems of Mary Oliver

by Mary Oliver

I would rather die than try to explain to the blue horses what war is.

Maybe our world will grow kinder eventually. Maybe the desire to make something beautiful is the piece of God that is inside each of us.

Well, there’s life, and then there’s later. Maybe it’s myself that I miss.

How many kinds of love might there be in the world,

And I have become the child of the clouds, and of hope.

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

He is exactly the poem I wanted to write.

Have I admired sufficiently the little hurricane of the hummingbird?

Count the roses, red and fluttering. Count the roses, wrinkled and salt. Each with its yellow lint at the center. Each with its honey pooled and ready. Do you have a question that can’t be answered? Do the stars frighten you by their heaviness and their endless number? Does it bother you, that mercy is so difficult to understand? For some souls it’s easy; they lie down on the sand and are soon asleep. For others, the mind shivers in its glacial palace, and won’t come. Yes, the mind takes a long time, is otherwise occupied than by happiness, and deep breathing. Now, in the distance, some bird is singing. And now I have gathered six or seven deep red, half-opened cups of petals between my hands, and now I have put my face against them and now I am moving my face back and forth, slowly, against them. The body is not much more than two feet and a tongue. Come to me, says the blue sky, and say the word. And finally even the mind comes running, like a wild thing, and lies down in the sand. Eternity is not later, or in any unfindable place. Roses, roses, roses, roses.

Listen, are you breathing just a little, and calling it a life?

Above the evil man and the just, the same stars. Above the child who will recover and the child who will not recover, the same energies roll forward, from one tragedy to the next and from one foolishness to the next.

is otherwise occupied than by happiness, and deep breathing. Still, at last, it comes too, running like a wild thing,

solicitude

“Make of yourself a light,”

A person wants to stand in a happy place, in a poem.

I think this is the prettiest world—so long as you don’t mind a little dying, how could there be a day in your whole life that doesn’t have its splash of happiness?