To Better Love This World

The Dog of Joy - Leaping for a Treat!

Dear Mary Oliver,
I read your poem to him
as he drove us up-Island.
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."
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 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, telling tales
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 shift,
and knew the gift had been received.
I 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 know this. And I know that
Mother Earth hums a love song
to all her children, furry and not.

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


for Brendan at earthweal, where he inspires us with Mary Oliver's words today. I wrote this in 2018. The quoted lines are from Mary Oliver's wonderful The Leaf and the Cloud, a book-length poem about life and death.