Tuesday, April 22, 2014

Mary Oliver


As a gift to each other Michael and I started a day at sunrise reading from Mary Oliver’s Pulitzer Prize winning book of poems, A Thousand Mornings. I cannot recommend her poetry enough. As a writer in her 80's now, Oliver is full of wonder and praise. Her faith sings through clear observations of the natural world. In her poems she climbs trees, runs across fields, stands at the oceans edge, listens to the songs of reptiles and traces the flight of birds.

We ended the evening rereading each poem back to each other. It was such a gift of the day! 

Here are two of my favorites:
POEM of ONE WORLD
This morning
The beautiful white heron
Was floating along above the water

And then into the sky of this
The one world
We all belong to

Where everything
Sooner or later
Is part of everything else

Which thought made me feel
For a little while
Quite beautiful myself.

ON TRAVELING TO BEAUTIFUL PLACES
Every day I’m still looking for God
And I’m still finding him everywhere,
In the dust, in the flowerbeds.
Certainly in the oceans,
In the islands that lay in the distance
Continents of ice, countries of sand
Each with its own set of creatures
And God, by whatever name.
How perfect to be aboard a ship with
Maybe a hundred years still in my pocket.
But it’s late for us,
And in truth the only ship there is
Is the ship we are all on
Burning the world as we go.

1 comment:

  1. Actually A Thousand Mornings was not the volume for which Mary won the Pulitzer. She won it in 1984 for American Primitive. This book was published almost 40 years later...

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