“Don’t Worry” by Mary Oliver

Things take the time they take. Don’t
worry.
How many roads did Saint Augustine follow
before he became Saint Augustine?

Mary Oliver

Felicity

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Bird of the Heart

“Wild sings the bird of the heart in the forests of our lives.”

~ Mary Oliver, from “Wild, Wild”

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“Work, Sometimes” by Mary Oliver

I was sad all day, and why not. There I was, books piled
on both sides of the table, paper stacked up, words
falling off my tongue.

The robins had been a long time singing, and now it
was beginning to rain.

What are we sure of? Happiness isn’t a town on a map,
or an early arrival, or a job well done, but good work
ongoing. Which is not likely to be the trifling around
with a poem.

Then it began raining hard, and the flowers in the yard
were full of lively fragrance.

You have had days like this, no doubt. And wasn’t it
wonderful, finally, to leave the room? Ah, what a
moment!

As for myself, I swung the door open. And there was
the wordless, singing world. And I ran for my life.

Mary Oliver
New and Selected Poems, Vol. II

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“The Sunflowers” by Mary Oliver

Come with me
into the field of sunflowers.
Their faces are burnished disks,
their dry spines

creak like ship masts,
their green leaves,
so heavy and many,
fill all day with the sticky

sugars of the sun.
Come with me
to visit the sunflowers,
they are shy

but want to be friends;
they have wonderful stories
of when they were young –
the important weather,

the wandering crows.
Don’t be afraid
to ask them questions!
Their bright faces,

which follow the sun,
will listen, and all
those rows of seeds –
each one a new life!

hope for a deeper acquaintance;
each of them, though it stands
in a crowd of many,
like a separate universe,

is lonely, the long work
of turning their lives
into a celebration
is not easy. Come

and let us talk with those modest faces,
the simple garments of leaves,
the coarse roots in the earth
so uprightly burning.

Mary Oliver
New and Selected Poems Vol. 1

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The Extraordinary Poetry of Mary Oliver

“Now of all the voyagers I remember, who among them
Did not board ship with grief among their maps?”
~ lines from “No Voyage” by Mary Oliver

Poems – Rage, Mockingbirds, More

Mary Oliver’s Provincetown: A Poet’s Landscape
(recordings of poems in the poet’s voice
with slideshow of photos of Provincetown and surroundings)

The Bard of Provincetown
(NYTimes essay by Mary Duenwald – July 1, 2009)

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Twelve Women Poets at the Turn of the 21st Century

Ruth Stone (1915-2011)

Academy of American Poet – Ruth Stone

The Poetry Foundation – Ruth Stone

Modern American Poets – Ruth Stone

What Love Comes To: New and Selected Poems

Poems Online

Madeleine DeFrees (1919-2015)

Poet’s Website

Academy of American Poets – Madeleine DeFrees

Blue Dusk: New and Selected Poems (2001)

Denise Levertov (1923-1997)

Academy of American Poets – Denise Levertov

The Poetry Foundation – Denise Levertov

Modern American Poets – Denise Levertov

The Collected Poems of Denise Levertov (2014)

Poems Online

YT Clip

Maya Angelou (1928-2014 )

Poet’s Website

The Academy of American Poets – Maya Angelou

The Poetry Foundation – Maya Angelou

The Complete Collected Poems of Maya Angelou (2009)
Poems Online

Mary Oliver (1935-)

Publisher’s Website

The Academy of American Poets – Mary Oliver

The Poetry Foundation – Mary Oliver

New and Selected Poems, Vol. I (1992) and New and Selected Poems, Vol. II (2005)

Poems Online 

Louise Glück (1943-)

The Academy of American Poets – Louise Glück

The Poetry Foundation – Louise Glück

Poems, 1962-2012

Poems Online

Marilyn Nelson (1946-)

Poet’s Website

The Academy of American Poets – Marilyn Nelson

The Poetry Foundation – Marilyn Nelson

Fields of Praise: New and Selected Poems (1997) and Faster Than Light: New and Selected Poems, 1996-2011 (2012)

Poems Online

Jane Kenyon (1947-1995)

The Academy of American Poets – Jane Kenyon

The Poetry Foundation – Jane Kenyon

Otherwise: New & Selected Poems (1997)

Poems Online 

Joy Harjo (1951-)

Poet’s Website

The Academy of American Poets – Joy Harjo

The Poetry Foundation – Joy Harjo

How We Became Human: New and Selected Poems, 1975-2001 (2002)

Poems Online  …

“She Had Some Horses” (read aloud by the poet)

More: Native American Women Poets

Rita Dove (1952-)

The Academy of American Poets – Rita Dove

The Poetry Foundation – Rita Dove

Modern American Poets – Rita Dove

Achievement – Rita Dove

Selected Poems (1993)

Poems Online

Ana Castillo (1953-)

Poet’s Website

The Poetry Foundation – Ann Castillo

My Father was a Toltec and Selected Poems, 1973-1988 and I Ask the Impossible (2011)

Marilyn Chin (1955-)

The Academy of American Poets – Marilyn Chin

The Poetry Foundation – Marilyn Chin

Modern American Poets – Marilyn Chin

Rhapsody in Plain Yellow (2003)

and The Phoenix Gone, the Terrace Empty (2009)

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“The Place I Want to Get Back To” by Mary Oliver

The place I want to get back to
is where
in the pinewoods
in the moments between
the darkness
and first light
two deer
came walking down the hill
and when they saw me
they said to each other, okay,
this one is okay,
let’s see who she is
and why she is sitting
on the ground like that,
so quiet, as if
asleep, or in a dream,
but, anyway, harmless;
and so they came
on their slender legs
and gazed upon me
not unlike the way
I go out to the dunes and look
and look and look
into the faces of the flowers;
and then one of them leaned forward
and nuzzled my hand, and what can my life
bring to me that could exceed
that brief moment?
For twenty years
I have gone every day to the same woods,
not waiting, exactly, just lingering.
Such gifts, bestowed,
can’t be repeated.
If you want to talk about this
come to visit. I live in the house
near the corner, which I have named
Gratitude.

Mary Oliver
Thirst (Beacon Press, 2006)

*shared by Marj Mead, who works in the Wade Center near Wheaton College, with Linda Richardson, the deacon at Church of the Savior, who passed it on to me via Facebook … I read it after returning from Wright’s Lake in the Sierras–perfect.

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“Hummingbirds” by Mary Oliver

The female, and two chicks,

each no bigger than my thumb,

scattered,

shimmering

in their pale-green dresses;

then they rose, tiny fireworks,

into the leaves

and hovered;

then they sat down,

each one with dainty, charcoal feet –

each one on a slender branch –

and looked at me.

I had meant no harm,

I had simply

climbed the tree

for something to do

on a summer day,

not knowing they were there,

ready to burst the ledges

of their mossy nest

and to fly, for the first time,

in their sea-green helmets,

with brisk, metallic tails –

each tulled wing,

with every dollop of flight,

drawing a perfect wheel

across the air.

Then, with a series of jerks,

they paused in front of me

and, dark-eyed, stared –

as though I were a flower –

and then,

like three tosses of silvery water,

they were gone.

Alone,

in the crown of the tree,

I went to China,

I went to Prague;

I died, and was born in the spring;

I found you, and loved you, again.

Later the darkness fell

and the solid moon

like a white pond rose.

But I wasn’t in any hurry.

Likely I visted all

the shimmering, heart-stabbing

questions without answers

before I climbed down.

***

Mary Oliver

White Pine (1994)

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“Wild Geese” by Mary Oliver

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.
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.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting–
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

Mary Oliver 

Geese in Addenbrooke Park, Lakewood, CO

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Mary Oliver on Getting Ready to Write Poetry

“If Romeo and Juliet had made appointments to meet, in the moonlight-swept orchard, in all the peril and sweetness of conspiracy, and then more often than not failed to meet — one or the other lacking, or afraid, or busy elsewhere — there would have been no romance, no passion, none of the drama for which we remember and celebrate them.

Writing a poem is not so different — it is a kind of possible love affair between something like the heart (that courageous but also shy factory of emotion) and the learned skills of the conscious mind. They make appointments with each other, and keep them, and something begins to happen. Or, they make appointments with each other but are casual and often fail to keep them: count on it, nothing happens.

That part of the psyche that works in concert with consciousness and supplies a necessary part of the poem — the heat of the star as opposed to the shape of the star, let us say — exists in a mysterious, unmapped zone: not unconscious, not subconscious, but cautious. It learns quickly what sort of courtship it is going to be …”

Mary Oliver
A Poetry Handbook (1994)

 

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Mary Oliver on how to live

” When it’s over, I want to say: all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.”

from “When Death Comes” by Mary Oliver

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