Devotions: The Selected Poems of Mary Oliver

by Mary Oliver

I felt like the little donkey when his burden is finally lifted. Things! Burn them, burn them! Make a beautiful fire! More room in your heart for love, for the trees! For the birds who own nothing—the reason they can fly.

So, be slow if you must, but let the heart still play its true part. Love still as once you loved, deeply and without patience.

as for purpose there is none, it is simply one of those gorgeous things that was made to do what it does perfectly and to last, as almost nothing does, almost forever.

Of course I wake up finally thinking, how wonderful to be who I am, made out of earth and water, my own thoughts, my own fingerprints— all that glorious, temporary stuff.

I too have known loneliness. I too have known what it is to feel misunderstood, rejected, and suddenly not at all beautiful. Oh, mother earth, your comfort is great, your arms never withhold. It has saved my life to know this.

How would it be to be Percy, I wonder, not thinking, not weighing anything, just running forward.

As long as you’re dancing, you can break the rules. Sometimes breaking the rules is just extending the rules. Sometimes there are no rules.

If you suddenly and unexpectedly feel joy, don’t hesitate. Give in to it. There are plenty of lives and whole towns destroyed or about to be. We are not wise, and not very often kind. And much can never be redeemed. Still, life has some possibility left. Perhaps this is its way of fighting back, that sometimes something happens better than all the riches or power in the world. It could be anything, but very likely you notice it in the instant when love begins. Anyway, that’s often the case. Anyway, whatever it is, don’t be afraid of its plenty. Joy is not made to be a crumb.

Besides, when I am alone I can become invisible. I can sit on the top of a dune as motionless as an uprise of weeds, until the foxes run by unconcerned. I can hear the almost unhearable sound of the roses singing. If you have ever gone to the woods with me, I must love you very much.

How many kinds of love might there be in the world, and how many formations might they make

I do not live happily or comfortably with the cleverness of our times. The talk is all about computers, the news is all about bombs and blood.

What I loved in the beginning, I think, was mostly myself. Never mind that I had to, since somebody had to.

Love yourself. Then forget it. Then, love the world.

Thus the world grows rich, grows wild, and you too, grow rich, grow sweetly wild, as you too were born to be.

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 this 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.

The way somebody comes back, but only in a dream.

We will be known as a culture that feared death and adored power, that tried to vanquish insecurity for the few and cared little for the penury of the many. We will be known as a culture that taught and rewarded the amassing of things, that spoke little if at all about the quality of life for people (other people), for dogs, for rivers. All the world, in our eyes, they will say, was a commodity. And they will say that this structure was held together politically, which it was, and they will say also that our politics was no more than an apparatus to accommodate the feelings of the heart, and that the heart, in those days, was small, and hard, and full of meanness.

I tell you this to break your heart, by which I mean only that it break open and never close again to the rest of the world.

This is what love is: the dry rose bush the gardener, in his pruning, missed suddenly bursts into bloom. A madness of delight; an obsession. A holy gift, certainly. But often, alas, improbable. Why couldn’t Romeo have settled for someone else? Why couldn’t Tristan and Isolde have refused the shining cup which would have left peaceful the whole kingdom? Wild sings the bird of the heart in the forests of our lives. Over and over Faust, standing in the garden, doesn’t know anything that’s going to happen, he only sees the face of Marguerite, which is irresistible. And wild, wild sings the bird.

I think sometimes of the possible glamour of death— that it might be wonderful to be lost and happy inside the green grass— or to be the green grass!— or, maybe the pink rose, or the blue iris, or the affable daisy, or the twirled vine looping its way skyward—that it might be perfectly peaceful to be the shining lake, or the hurrying, athletic river, or the dark shoulders of the trees where the thrush each evening weeps himself into an ecstasy.

Watch, now, how I start the day in happiness, in kindness.

Accept the miracle. Accept, too, each spoken word spoken with love.

The geese flew on.

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.