Drea Art
dreajensengallery.artistwebsites.com
facebook.com/dreajensenart
virtualartistaltar.com

This Morning
By Mary Oliver

This morning the redbirds’ eggs

have hatched and already the chicks

are chirping for food. They don’t

know where it’s coming from, they

just keep shouting, “More! More!”

As to anything else, they haven’t

had a single thought. Their eyes

haven’t yet opened, they know nothing

about the sky that’s waiting. Or

the thousands, the millions of trees.

They don’t even know they have wings.

And just like that, like a simple

neighborhood event, a miracle

is taking place.

Drea Art
dreajensengallery.artistwebsites.com
facebook.com/dreajensenart
virtualartistaltar.com

To Begin With, the Sweet Grass
by Mary Oliver

1.
Will the hungry ox stand in the field and not eat of the sweet grass?
Will the owl bite off its own wings?
Will the lark forget to lift its body in the air or forget to sing?
Will the rivers run upstream?

Behold, I say–behold
the reliability and the finery and the teachings of this gritty earth gift.

2.
Eat bread and understand comfort.
Drink water, and understand delight.
Visit the garden where the scarlet trumpets are opening their bodies for the hummingbirds
who are drinking the sweetness, who are thrillingly gluttonous.

For one thing leads to another.
Soon you will notice how stones shine underfoot.
Eventually tides will be the only calendar you believe in.

And someone’s face, whom you love, will be as a star
both intimate and ultimate,
and you will be both heart-shaken and respectful.
And you will hear the air itself, like a beloved, whisper:
oh, let me, for a while longer, enter the two
beautiful bodies of your lungs.

3.
The witchery of living
is my whole conversation
with you my darlings.
All I can tell you is what I know.

Look, and look again.
This world is not just a little thrill for the eyes.

It’s more than bones.
It’s more than the delicate wrist with its personal pulse.
It’s more than the beating of the single heart.
It’s praising.
It’s giving until the giving feels like receiving.
You have a life—just imagine that!
You have this day, and maybe another, and maybe still another.

4.
Someday I am going to ask my friend Paulus,
the dancer, the potter,
to make me a begging bowl
which I believe
my soul needs.

And if I come to you,
to the door of your comfortable house
with unwashed clothes and unclean fingernails,
will you put something into it?

I would like to take this chance.
I would like to give you this chance.

5.
We do one thing or another; we stay the same or we change.
Congratulations if you have changed.

6.
Let me ask you this.
Do you also think that beauty exists for some fabulous reason?

And if you have not been enchanted by this adventure—your life—
what would do for you?

7.
What I loved in the beginning, I think, was mostly myself.
Never mind that I had to, since somebody had to.
That was many years ago.
Since then I have gone out from my confinements, though with difficulty

I mean the ones that are thought to rule my heart.
I cast them out, I put them on the mush pile.
They will be nourishment somehow (everything is nourishment somehow or another).

And I have become the child of the clouds, and of hope.
I have become the friend of the enemy, whoever that is.
I have become older and, cherishing what I have learned,
I have become younger.

And what do I risk to tell you this, which is all I know?
Love yourself. Then forget it. Then, love the world.

Drea Art
dreajensengallery.artistwebsites.com
facebook.com/dreajensenart
virtualartistaltar.com

I Don’t Want to Live a Small Life
By Mary Oliver

I don’t want to live a small life. Open your eyes,
open your hands. I have just come
from the berry fields, the sun

kissing me with its golden mouth all the way

(open your hands) and the wind-winged clouds
following along thinking perhaps I might

feed them, but no I carry these heart-shapes

only to you. Look how many small
but so sweet and maybe the last gift

I will bring to anyone in this

world of hope and risk, so do
Look at me. Open your life, open your hands.

Drea Art
dreajensengallery.artistwebsites.com
facebook.com/dreajensenart
virtualartistaltar.com

Moon and Water
By Mary Oliver

I wake and spend
the last hours
of darkness
with no one

but the moon.
She listens
to my complaints
like the good

companion she is
and comforts me surely
with her light.
But she, like everyone,

has her own life.
So finally I understand
that she has turned away,
is no longer listening.

She wants me
to refold myself
into my own life.
And, bending close,

as we all dream of doing,
she rows with her white arms
through the dark water
which she adores.

Drea Art
dreajensengallery.artistwebsites.com
facebook.com/dreajensenart
virtualartistaltar.com

Fireflies
by Mary Oliver

At Blackwater
fireflies
are not even a dime a dozen–
they are free,

and each floats and turns
among the branches of the oaks
and the swamp azaleas
looking for another

as, who doesn’t?
Oh, blessings
on the intimacy
inside fruition,

be it foxes
or the fireflies
or the dampness inside the petals
of a thousand flowers.

Though Eden is lost
its loveliness
remains in the heart
and the imagination;

he would take her
in a boat
over the dark water;
she would take him

to an island she knows
where the blue flag grows wild
and the grass is deep,
where the birds

perch together,
feather to feather,
on the bough.
And the fireflies,

blinking their little lights,
hurry toward one another.
And the world continues,
God willing.

Drea Art
dreajensengallery.artistwebsites.com
facebook.com/dreajensenart
virtualartistaltar.com

Honey Locust
By Mary Oliver

Who can tell how lovely in June is the

honey locust tree, or why

a tree should be so sweet and live

in this world? Each white blossom

on a dangle of white flowers holds one green seed-

a new life. Also each blossom on a dangle of flower

holds a flask

of fragrance called heave, which is never sealed.

The bees circle the tree and dive into it. They are crazy

with gratitude. They are working like farmers. They are as

happy as saints. After awhile the flowers begin to

wilt and drop down into the grass. Welcome

shines in the grass.

Each year I gather

handfuls of blossoms and eat of their mealiness; the honey

melts n my mouth, the seeds make me strong,

both when they are crisps and ripe, and even at the end

when their petals have turned dully yellow.

So it is

if the heart has devoted itself to love, there is

not a single inch of emptiness. Gladness gleams

all the way to the grave.

floating in,

then the scouts going out,

then their coming back, and their dancing-

nothing different

but what happens in our own village.

What pity for the tiny souls

Who are so hopeful, and work so diligently

until time brings, as it does, the slap and the claw

Someday, of course, the bear himself

will become a bee, a honey bee, in the general mixing.

Nature, under her long green hair,

has such unbendable rules,

and a bee is not a powerful thing, even

when there are many

as people, in a town or a village.

And what, moreover, is catastrophe?

Is it the sharp sword of God,

or just some other wild body, loving its life?

Not caring a whit, black bear

blinks his horrible, beautiful eyes,

slicks his teeth with his fat and happy tongue,

and saunters on.

to follow a thought quietly

to its logical end.

I have done this a few times.

But mostly I just stand in the dark field,

in the middle of the world, breathing

in and out. Life so far doesn’t have any other name

but breath and light, wind and rain.

If there’s a temple, I haven’t found it yet.

I simply go on drifting, in the heaven of the grass and the weeds.

Harvest Moon
By Mary Oliver

No sky could hold

so much light–

and here comes the brimming,

the flooding and streaming

out of the clouds

and into the leaves,

glazing the creeks,

the smallest ditches!

And so many stars!

The sky seems stretched

like an old black cloth;

behind it, all

the celestial fire

we ever dreamed of!

And the moon steps lower,

quietly changing

her luminous masks, brushing

everything as she passes

with her slow hands

and soft lips–

clusters of dark grapes,

apples swinging like lost planets,

melons cool and heavy as bodies–

and the mockingbird wakes

in his hidden castle;

out of the silver tangle

of thorns and leaves

he flutters and tumbles,

spilling long

ribbons of music

over forest and river,

copse and cloud–

all heaven and all earth–

wherever the white moon

fancies her small wild prince–

field after field after field.

The Sun
By Mary Oliver

Have you ever seen
anything
in your life
more wonderful

than the way the sun,
every evening,
relaxed and easy,
floats toward the horizon

and into the clouds or the hills,
or the rumpled sea,
and is gone–
and how it slides again

out of the blackness,
every morning,
on the other side of the world,
like a red flower

streaming upward on its heavenly oils,
say, on a morning in early summer,
at its perfect imperial distance–
and have you ever felt for anything
such wild love–
do you think there is anywhere, in any language,
a word billowing enough
for the pleasure

that fills you,
as the sun
reaches out,
as it warms you

as you stand there,
empty-handed–
or have you too
turned from this world–

or have you too
gone crazy
for power,
for things?

Heart Poem
By Mary Oliver

My heart, that used to pump along so pleasantly,
has come now to a different sort of music.

There is someone inside those red walls, irritated
and even, occasionally, irrational.

Years ago I was part of an orchestra; our conductor
was a wild man. He was forever rapping the music-
stand for silence. Then he would call out some
correction and we would begin again.

Now again it is the wild man.

I remember the music shattering, and our desperate
attentiveness.

Once he flung the baton over our heads and into
the midst of the players. It flew over the violins
and landed next to a bass fiddle. It flopped to the
floor. What silence! Then someone picked it up
and it was passed forward back to him. He rapped
the stand and raised his arms. Then we all breathed
again, and the music restarted.

Mindful
By Mary Oliver

Every day I see or hear something that more or less kills me with delight,

that leaves me like a needle in the haystack of Light.

It was what I was born for – to look, listen, to lose myself inside this soft world – to instruct myself over and over in joy, and acclamation.

Nor am I talking about the exceptional, the fearful, the dreadful, the very extravagant – but of the ordinary, the common, the very drab, the daily presentations.

Oh, good scholar, I tell myself, how can you help but grow wise with such teachings as these – the untrimmable light of the world, the ocean’s shine, the prayers that are made out of grass?

“I believe in kindness. Also in mischief. Also in singing, especially when singing is not necessarily prescribed.”
~ Mary Oliver