Devotions: The Selected Poems of Mary Oliver

by Mary Oliver

I wouldn’t mind being a rose in a field full of roses. Fear has not yet occurred to them, nor ambition. Reason they have not yet thought of. Neither do they ask how long they must be roses, and then what. Or any other foolish question.

If the world were only pain and logic, who would want it? Of course, it isn’t. Neither do I mean anything miraculous, but only the light that can shine out of a life.

For years and years I struggled just to love my life. And then the butterfly rose, weightless, in the wind. “Don’t love your life too much,” it said, and vanished into the world.

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.

But little by little, as you left their voices behind, the stars began to burn through the sheets of clouds, and there was a new voice, which you slowly recognized as your own, that kept you company as you strode deeper and deeper into the world, determined to do the only thing you could do— determined to save the only life you could save.

What blazes the trail is not necessarily pretty.

The dream of my life Is to lie down by a slow river And stare at the light in the trees— To learn something by being nothing A little while but the rich Lens of attention.

You say: I heard rumors of trouble, but after all we all have that. You say: what could I have done? and you go with the rest, to bury him.

everything else is a mystery, and you know nothing at all except the moonlight is beautiful— white rivers running together along the bare boughs of the trees— and somewhere, for someone, life is becoming moment by moment unbearable.

Now the women are gathering in smoke-filled rooms, rough as politicians, scrappy as club fighters. And should anyone be surprised if sometimes, when the white moon rises, women want to lash out with a cutting edge?

And that’s when you know you will live whether you will or not, one way or another, because everything is everything else, one long muscle. It’s no more mysterious than that. So you relax, you don’t fight it anymore, the darkness coming down called water, called spring, called the green leaf, called a woman’s body as it turns into mud and leaves, as it beats in its cage of water, as it turns like a lonely spindle in the moonlight, as it says yes.

It is the slow and difficult Trick of living, and finding it where you are.

And till the principle of things takes root, How shall examples move us from our calm? I do not say that it is not a fault. I only say, except as we have loved, All news arrives as from a distant land.