Devotions: The Selected Poems of Mary Oliver

by Mary Oliver

For the birds who own nothing—the reason they can fly.

I GO DOWN TO THE SHORE I go down to the shore in the morning and depending on the hour the waves are rolling in or moving out, and I say, oh, I am miserable, what shall— what should I do? And the sea says in its lovely voice: Excuse me, I have work to do.

Yes, it could be that I am a tiny piece of God, and each of you too, or at least of his intention and his hope. Which is a delight beyond measure.

Instructions for living a life: Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it.

believe us, they say, it is a serious thing just to be alive on this fresh morning in this broken world.

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.

If you can sing, do it. If not, even silence can feel, to the world, like happiness, like praise, from the pool of shade you have found beneath the everlasting.

LOGOS Why wonder about the loaves and the fishes? If you say the right words, the wine expands. If you say them with love and the felt ferocity of that love and the felt necessity of that love, the fish explode into many. Imagine him, speaking, and don’t worry about what is reality, or what is plain, or what is mysterious. If you were there, it was all those things. If you can imagine it, it is all those things. Eat, drink, be happy. Accept the miracle. Accept, too, each spoken word spoken with love.

Have you ever seen anything in your life more wonderful than the way the sun, every evening, relaxed and easy, floats toward the horizon and into the clouds or the hills,

clearly I’m not needed, yet I feel myself turning into something of inexplicable value.

I don’t know exactly what a prayer is. I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass, how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields, which is what I have been doing all day. Tell me, what else should I have done? Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon? Tell me, what is it you plan to do

with your one wild and precious life?

There is only one question; how to love this world.

THE ROSES One day in summer when everything has already been more than enough the wild beds start exploding open along the berm of the sea; day after day you sit near them; day after day the honey keeps on coming in the red cups and the bees like amber drops roll in the petals: there is no end,

believe me! to the inventions of summer, to the happiness your body is willing to bear.

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.