Why I Wake Early

by Mary Oliver

Hello, sun in my face.

best preacher that ever was,

to ease us with warm touching,

to hold us in the great hands of light—

good morning, good morning, g...

Watch, now, how I start the day in happines...

I believe I will never quite know. Though I play at the edges of knowing, truly I know our part is not knowing, but looking, and touching, and loving, which is the way I walked on, softly, through the pale-pink morning light.

There are things you can’t reach. But you can reach out to them, and all day long. The wind, the bird flying away. The idea of God. And it can keep you as busy as anything else, and happier.

Oh Lord, how shining and festive is your gift to us, if we only look, and see.

Then I remember: death comes before the rolling away of the stone.

Don’t call this world adorable, or useful, that’s not it.

It’s frisky,

Don’t call this world an explanation, or even an education.

Oh, to love what is lovely, and will not last! What a task to ask of anything, or anyone, yet it is ours, and not by the century or the year, but by the hours.

Oh, I would like to live in an empty house, with vines for walls, and a carpet of grass.

And I suppose sometime I will. Old and cold I will lie apart from all this buying and selling, with only the beautiful earth in my heart.

Wherever I am, the world comes after me. It offers me its busyness. It does not believe that I do not want it.

How great was its energy, how humble its effort.

Let us hope it will always be like this, each of us going on in our inexplicable ways building the universe.