Eva Schriek’s Reviews > Devotions: The Selected Poems of Mary Oliver > Status Update

little by little, as you left their voices behind, the stars began to burn through the sheets of clouds, and there was a new voice, which you slowly recognized as your own, that kept you company as you strode deeper and deeper into the world, determined to do the only thing you could do - determined to save the only life you could save.

do you think this world is only an entertainment to you?
never to enter the sea and notice how the water divides with perfect courtesy, to let you in!
never to lie down on the grass, as though you were the grass!
never to leap the air as you open your wings over the dark acorn of your heart!
well, there is time left - fields everywhere invite you into them.
are you breathing just a little, and calling it a life?

This is what love is: the dry rose bush the gardener, in his pruning, missed
suddenly bursts into bloom.
A madness of delight; an obsession.
A holy gift, certainly.
But often, alas, improbable.
Why couldn’t Romeo have settled for someone else? Why couldn’t Tristan and Isolde refuse the shining cup which would have left peaceful the whole kingdom?
Wild sings the bird of the heart in the forests of our lives.

‘(…) 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.’