Devotions: The Selected Poems of Mary Oliver

by Mary Oliver

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.

And someone’s face, whom you love, will be as a star both intimate and ultimate, and you will be both heart-shaken and respectful.

How people come, from delight or the scars of damage, to the comfort of a poem.

Let me keep company always with those who say “Look!” and laugh in astonishment, and bow their heads.

I don’t know what God is. I don’t know what death is. But I believe they have between them some fervent and necessary arrangement.

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.

It’s almost dawn and the usual half-miracles begin

the way the flowers were dressed in nothing but light.

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

Oh sweetness pure and simple, may I join you?

into the moon-eye of God, into the white fan that lies at the bottom of the sea with everything that ever was, or ever will be,

Nothing lasts. There is a graveyard where everything I am talking about is, now. I stood there once, on the green grass, scattering flowers.

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.

Do the stars frighten you by their heaviness and their endless number? Does it bother you, that mercy is so difficult to understand?

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

After excitement we are so restful. When the thumb of fear lifts, we are so alive.

What misery to be afraid of death. What wretchedness, to believe only in what can be proven.

When it’s over, I want to say: all my life I was a bride married to amazement.

of course loss is the great lesson.

Look, I want to love this world as though it’s the last chance I’m ever going to get to be alive and know it.

Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?

Don’t bother me. I’ve just been born.

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.

whatever the name of the catastrophe, it is never the opposite of love.

Last night the geese came back, slanting fast from the blossom of the rising moon down to the black pond. A muskrat swimming in the twilight saw them and hurried to the secret lodges to tell everyone spring had come.

I know several lives worth living.

like silk, the flowers burn, and I want to live my life all over again, to begin again, to be utterly wild.

there is no end, believe me! to the inventions of summer, to the happiness your body is willing to bear.

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.

There was an owl there, sick of its hunger but still trapped in it, unable to be anything else.

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.

That night, you turn in your bed to watch the moon rise, and once more see what a small coin it is against the darkness, and how everything else is a mystery, and you know nothing at all except the moonlight is beautiful—

And should anyone be surprised if sometimes, when the white moon rises, women want to lash out with a cutting edge?