The Beauty of This World

Dear Mary Oliver,

I read you to him
as he drove us up-Island.
He listened, he smiled.
He was a hello, and so soon a goodbye.
When I got home, I read some more,
pausing when you wrote, of your parents:
"May they sleep well. May they soften."
Life is a long list of letting go's.

You wrote:
"A lifetime isn't long enough
for the beauties of this world."

It's true:
all those years spent earning a living,
instead of joyously living a life.
"And I am thinking: maybe just
looking and listening 

is the real work."

I look, now.

I listen well.

I am a poet, reading a Master, and you tell me:
"....the poem....wants to open itself
like the little door of a temple."
You say: "It may be the rock in the field
is also a song" and I know this,
for I have heard it, singing songs
of centuries ago.
You say: "Maybe the world, without us,
is the real poem."

I was a woman of sixty, when I read:
"I am a woman of sixty, of no special courage",
and my last love had been and gone.
I and my black wolf were in love with the wild
and it - and we - were enough.

I read your book to the living,
and I read your book
to the dying woman in a coma,
to whom I wanted to give a gift.
I felt the energy in the room change,
as the gift was received,
and walked outside into a rainbow.
And all of it -
the dying woman, your words,
the sky, my heart -
was enough and more than enough.

You said:
"Remember me......I am the one who told you
that the grass is also alive,
and listening."

I close the book in gratitude
for the words that help me
better love this world.

A poem from one year ago, re-posted in honour of my favourite poet, Mary Oliver. The quotes are from her The Leaf and the Cloud, a slim, book-length poem that is truly amazing, so full of life and death and all of its beauties. I may share this with the Tuesday Platform at Real Toads on Tuesday.