Devotions: The Selected Poems of Mary Oliver

by Mary Oliver

And just like that, like a simple neighborhood event, a miracle is taking place.

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.

Will I always, from now on, be this cold?

Be still, my soul, and steadfast. Earth and heaven both are still watching though time is draining from the clock and your walk, that was confident and quick, has become slow.

Maybe our world will grow kinder eventually.

So I just lie like that, while distance and time reveal their true attitudes: they never heard of me, and never will, or ever need to.

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.

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

I am trying to live, as you said we must, the examined life. But there are days I wish there was less in my head to examine, not to speak of the busy heart.

I also know the way the old life haunts the new.

I know I can walk through the world, along the shore or under the trees, with my mind filled with things of little importance, in full self-attendance. A condition I can’t really call being alive.

We shake with joy, we shake with grief. What a time they have, these two housed as they are in the same body.

Sometimes I need only to stand wherever I am to be blessed.

and suggest that you sit now very quietly in some lovely wild place, and listen to the silence.

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.

Let me ask you this. Do you also 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?

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

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

I believe in kindness. Also in mischief.

Keep some room in your heart for the unimaginable.

And consider, always, every day, the determination of the grass to grow despite the unending obstacles.

imagine everything you can imagine, then keep on going.

Sometimes melancholy leaves me breathless.

and I could not tell which fit me more comfortably, the power, or the powerlessness; neither would have me entirely; I was divided,

“and you too have come into the world to do this, to go easy, to be filled with light, and to shine.”

Another morning and I wake with thirst for the goodness I do not have.

It is your life, which is so close to my own that I would not know where to drop the knife of separation. And what does this have to do with love, except everything?

Oh, to love what is lovely, and will not last!

as with a match which is lit, and bright, but does not hurt in the common way, but delightfully, as if delight were the most serious thing you ever felt.

when I saw them, I saw them as through the veil, secretly, joyfully, clearly.

Don’t think I’m not afraid. There is such an unleashing of horror.

There are things you can’t reach. But you can reach out to them, and all day long.

Softest of mornings, hello. And what will you do today, I wonder, to my heart?

And how much honey can the heart stand, I wonder, before it must break?

No doubt clocks are ticking loudly all over the world. I don’t hear them.

I am so vast, uncertain and strange.

Will I ever understand him? Certainly he will never understand me, or the world I come from.

I rise from the comfortable bed and go to another room, where my books are lined up in their neat and colorful rows. How magical they are!

Inside the house it is still dark, except for the pool of lamplight in which I am sitting. I do not close the book. Neither, for a long while, do I read on.

Of all the reasons for gladness, what could be foremost of this one, that the mind can seize both the instant and the memory!

Now that I’m free to be myself, who am I?

Nothing lasts. There is a graveyard where everything I am talking about is, now.

I mention them now, I will not mention them again. It is not lack of love nor lack of sorrow. But the iron thing they carried, I will not carry.

May they sleep well. May they soften.

Therefore, tell me: what will engage you? What will open the dark fields of your mind, like a lover at first touching?

A lifetime isn’t long enough for the beauty of this world and the responsibilities of your life. Scatter your flowers over the graves, and walk away. Be good-natured and untidy in your exuberance. In the glare of your mind, be modest. And beholden to what is tactile, and thrilling. Live with the beetle, and the wind. This is the dark bread of the poem. This is the dark and nourishing bread of the poem.

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?

Well, there is time left— fields everywhere invite you into them. And who will care, who will chide you if you wander away from wherever you are, to look for your soul?

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

Only last week I went out among the thorns and said to the wild roses: deny me not, but suffer my devotion.