Devotions: The Selected Poems of Mary Oliver

by Mary Oliver

only if there are angels in your head will you ever, possibly, see one.

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. Let God and the world know you are grateful. That the gift has been given.

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.

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.

Finally I saw that worrying had come to nothing. And gave it up. And took my old body and went out into the morning, and sang.

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.

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

Let me keep my distance, always, from those who think they have the answers. Let me keep company always with those who say “Look!” and laugh in astonishment, and bow their heads.

If God exists he isn’t just churches and mathematics. He’s the forest, He’s the desert. He’s the ice caps, that are dying. He’s the ghetto and the Museum of Fine Arts.

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.

But the river Clarion still flows from wherever it comes from to where it has been told to go. I pray for the desperate earth. I pray for the desperate world. I do the little each person can do, it isn’t much. Sometimes the river murmurs, sometimes it raves.

grow rich, grow sweetly wild, as you too were born to be.

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.

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

it is a serious thing just to be alive on this fresh morning in this broken world.

You sing, I listen. Both are necessary if the world is to continue going around night-heavy then light-laden, though not everyone knows this or at least not yet, or, perhaps, has forgotten it in the torn fields, in the terrible debris of progress.

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.

Though Eden is lost its loveliness remains in the heart and the imagination;

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.

You listen and you know you could live a better life than you do, be softer, kinder. And maybe this year you will

But here’s the kingdom we call remembrance with its thousand iron doors through which I pass so easily,

If there is life after the earth-life, will you come with me? Even then? Since we’re bound to be something, why not together.

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

their eagerness to be wild and perfect for a moment, before they are nothing, forever?

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.

I think this is the prettiest world—so long as you don’t mind a little dying,

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.

Whatever power of the earth rampages, we turn to it dazed but anonymous eyes; whatever the name of the catastrophe, it is never the opposite of love.

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.

Then I went down to a black creek and alder grove that is Ohio like nothing else is

I thought the earth remembered me, she took me back so tenderly,

she fled in that lick of flame all tedious bonds: supper, the duties of flesh and home, the knife at the throat, the death in the metronome.

As everything, forgetting its own enchantment, whispers: I too love oblivion why not it is full of second chances.

death: its suddenness, its terrible weight, its certain coming. Yet under reason burns a brighter fire, which the bones have always preferred. It is the story of endless good fortune. It says to oblivion: not me!

BEYOND THE SNOW BELT