Mary Oliver died today.
Mary Oliver, the prolific and award-winning poet, died on Thursday.
This is one of her poems:
“When Death Comes”
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.
When it’s over, I don’t want to wonder
if I have made of my life something particular, and real.
I don’t want to find myself sighing and frightened,
or full of argument.
I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world.
Our friend Bob Shepherd wrote about Mary Oliver:
No, I Will Not Tell You, Tonight, about Despair
Rest in Peace, Mary Oliver, September 10, 1935–January 17, 2019. How can we ever thank you?
We are so grateful for what you did with your wild and precious life.
How do we continue without you, Mother Mary, source of grace and courage? One thing, for certain, we must do: we must swallow your legacy whole, so that it becomes us, so that your voice lives in us and perhaps, if we are so blessed, will, at times, speak through us, a living thing.
Damn it.
Her most famous poem, to which Bob Shepherd alludes:
“The Summer Day
Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean-
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down-
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
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?
—Mary Oliver
Thank you for this. I am a sometime poet & follow the field, but somehow had not come upon Mary Oliver. I love these poems & will read more. Especially interested in reading her NE works, as I am a lifelong summer visitor to Cape Cod. She will be featured in the annual poetry session I run for my book club.
Have “met” her in her passing and all the people writing about her. R.I.P. Mary Oliver. Will read more of your brilliance
I often wonder about the connection of coincidence and fate. Are they randomly mutually exclusive or one and the same? Thank you, Diane and especially Bob for citing this poem. I attended a funeral last week of someone I met in the past year and with whom I developed a connection as well as two of her children. I’ve been trying to find the words to write them for the past week with no success. This poem broke the dam. I knew nothing about Mary Oliver an hour ago and now I have a feeling she’s going to be with me from now on through her writing.
So many similarities between Mary Oliver and Dr. Ravitch. Both are extraordinarily fine writers. Both have this seemingly boundless capacity for love expressed through their work, for love as giving a damn. And both have a no-nonsense manner about them, a fierceness of spirit that is downright scary sometimes and so frankly admirable.
Well said, Bob. Thanks to you, Diane and Mary.
AGREE, Bob. Thank you for writing what you wrote.
Yes. Yes, Yes. Fierce, no-nonsense, love as giving a damn and acting on that. Thank you Bob. And Diane.
Agreed, great poet, great poems.
Mary Oliver poems, like her wild geese, flew into my inbox this morning: Suddenly a whole new community created out of Mary Oliver lovers. Nearly 30 years ago, I brought American Primitive to the Kalahari with me and thought: if there were poems to send into space with Horizon, they would be hers. Last night, I went to bed with three of her books. Her poetry has sustained me through the darkest and most joyous hours of my life. Poetry to live by. Breathe out Peace. Oh Mary, may the galaxies of this precious universe welcome you home.
Thank you for this, Melissa, or this moving tribute to her.
*for