Mary Oliver is a superb poet of the natural world.
She has opened up the possibilities of nature-consciousness to many thousands.
Mary Oliver's poems use remarkably simple language to share her love for other lives
and make them come alive for the reader.
Mary Oliver helps us learn to be at home with Earth.
Mary Oliver helps us honor ourselves as parts of Earth.
Mary Oliver is the writer-in-residence at Sweet Briar College, in Virginia.
She received the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1984 for her book American Primitive.
[Poems] rinse things...
[They] rinse the words...
but also perhaps rinse - and hang out again
on the line -
values of freedom,
of spirit, and play.
~ Seamus Heaney
AT GREAT POND
by Mary Oliver
At Great Pond
the sun, rising,
scrapes his orange breast
on the thick pines,
and down tumble
a few orange feathers into
the dark water.
On the far shore
a white bird is standing
like a white candle ---
or a man, in the distance,
in the clasp of some meditation ---
while all around me the lilies
are breaking open again
from the black cave
of the night.
Later, I will consider
what I have seen ---
what it could signify ---
what words of adoration I might
make of it, and to do this
I will go indoors to my desk ---
I will sit in my chair ---
I will look back
into the lost morning
in which I am moving, now,
like a swimmer,
so smoothly,
so peacefully,
I am almost the lily ---
almost the bird vanishing over the water
on its sleeves of night.
AT BLACKWATER POND
by Mary Oliver
At Blackwater Pond the tossed waters have settled
after a night of rain.
I dip my cupped hands. I drink
a long time. It tastes
like stone, leaves, fire. It falls cold
into my body, waking the bones. I hear them
deep inside me, whispering
oh what is that beautiful thing
that just happened?
SPRING
by Mary Oliver
from New and Selected Poems. © Beacon Press.
Somewhere
a black bear
has just risen from sleep
and is staring
down the mountain.
All night
in the brisk and shallow restlessness
of early spring
I think of her,
her four black fists
flicking the gravel,
her tongue
like a red fire
touching the grass,
the cold water.
There is only one question:
how to love this world.
I think of her
rising
like a black and leafy ledge
to sharpen her claws against
the silence
of the trees.
Whatever else
my life is
with its poems
and its music
and its glass cities,
it is also this dazzling darkness
coming
down the mountain,
breathing and tasting;
all day I think of her--
her white teeth,
her wordlessness,
her perfect love.
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