Everything That Was Broken

Mary Oliver

It was Mary Oliver’s birthday a few days ago, and I had many poems I wanted to share, because ah well… it’s Mary Oliver. I don’t know what I can say that hasn’t already been said. But I can try and say a little bit about why I’m a fan.

I can’t remember the first Mary Oliver poem I read. But I can recount, in stark relief, many moments in my life when I have turned to her lines (lines that have been cast like dandelions upon the air of poems; with such ease, and such care) for comfort, for affirmation, and for strength. They have never failed me. So many times, her poetry has been the topic of discussion with close friends, not as examples of beautiful poetry, but as offerings in conversations about courage, anxiety and fear, loneliness and love, the ethics of care, the inner world and the outer resplendent natural world that makes us feel alive, and the journey. For instance, I remember being distraught, once, perturbed by a series of events that left me feeling furious and powerless. A friend used Oliver’s poem The Uses of Sorrow as a way of talking about grief - “Someone I loved once/ gave me a box full of darkness./ It took me years to understand/ that this too, was a gift.” I remember that conversation. I remember the seconds of silence after hearing those words, the way the half-moon peeked through the leaves, the cackling strays under my balcony, and the rice that got burnt in my kitchen as I went to look for the original, and then got lost in filling my ravenous soul with more of her poems. There are many such drops of manna spread across her body of work.

When I read her, or hear her poems in her own voice, I feel like I’m in the presence, always, of compelling honesty. Mary Oliver makes me feel, and she makes me want to throw the windows open, and go out and live. Behind those words, a songbird, drunk on the world, and eternally curious, is composing melodies that beseech the reader to pause, and to listen.

So when she asks “Listen–are you breathing just a little, and calling it a life?” I take notice. Because she has led me by the hand, waiting patiently as I trip on language, or get lost in some metaphor, or try and imagine what she has described. Because I know, that, in return, she demands nothing but the truth, a small price to pay, really. And I know, that when she listens, it will be with kindness.