Happy Birthday: When Death Comes, by Mary Oliver | Poems Rethabile Likes
🎂 Happy Birthday, Mary Oliver!
Poet • Pulitzer Winner • National Book Award • born 10 September 1935
Today we celebrate the birthday of Mary Oliver — one of America’s most beloved and widely read poets. Here is her masterful poem, "When Death Comes," a meditation on mortality, curiosity, and the call to live fully.
When Death Comes
When death comes
like the hungry bear in autumn;
when death comes and takes all the bright coins from his purse
to buy me, and snaps the purse shut;
when death comes
like the measle-pox;
when death comes
like an iceberg between the shoulder blades,
I want to step through the door full of curiosity, wondering:
what is it going to be like, that cottage of darkness?
And therefore I look upon everything
as a brotherhood and a sisterhood,
and I look upon time as no more than an idea,
and I consider eternity as another possibility,
and I think of each life as a flower, as common
as a field daisy, and as singular,
and each name a comfortable music in the mouth,
tending, as all music does, toward silence,
and each body a lion of courage, and something
precious to the earth.
When it's over, I want to say: all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.
When it's over, I don't want to wonder
if I have made of my life something particular, and real.
I don't want to find myself sighing and frightened,
or full of argument.
I don't want to end up simply having visited this world.
Mary Oliver (1935–2019) was an American poet. She won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1984 for American Primitive and the National Book Award in 1992 for New and Selected Poems. Her work is celebrated for its plain language, deep attention to the natural world, and themes of wonder, mortality, and living with presence. She lived for many years in Provincetown, Massachusetts, with her partner, photographer Molly Malone Cook.
Read more: Poetry Foundation • Academy of American Poets • Thriftbooks
Read more: Poetry Foundation • Academy of American Poets • Thriftbooks
Comments
funny that today, on what would've been her birthday, the chain saws are going in our communal garden, 'trimming' (as the saying goes) the trees.