For poems are not words, after all, but fires for the cold, ropes let down to the lost, something as necessary as bread in the pockets of the hungry.
–Mary Oliver
When I was sixteen years old, my sophomore English teacher announced the project—no, catalyst—that would change my life forever: the Poetry Project™.
An aspiring poet myself, I couldn’t wait to write. But my teacher’s instructions stopped my writing in its tracks: “Eighty-five percent of what you compile will be published poems. You will only write nine pieces.”
Dejected, I traipsed to the local library with my mother to round up some anthologies.
The maturity of a poet is shown through her knowledge of classical as well as current poetry. I quickly learned that I was not mature in my poetic prowess. My eyes scanned over strangers’ names: Sara Teasdale, Lucille Clifton, Adrienne Rich, Sharon Olds. I stupidly glazed right over them; I was searching for the names I knew: Edgar Allan Poe, E. E. Cummings, William Blake, Robert Frost.
My mother’s voice interrupted my thoughts.
“Mary Oliver,” she was saying. “She’s famous. She won a Pulitzer Prize back in the day. You might like her work.”
I glanced at the shelf my mother was pointing toward, and I read the titles of Mary Oliver’s books: Red Bird, Blue Horses, Dog Songs. Silly names. My eyes settled on a volume called Thirst.
That could work, I thought. I shrugged, yanking the book off the shelf and slinging it into my library tote.
I read the book with little understanding. Oliver spoke about foreign concepts: grief, bereavement, heartache “such as I can’t imagine.” I certainly couldn’t imagine.
And how quickly that would change.
When I was nineteen years old, my grandmother passed away. To borrow from Frost, “I had no one left but God.” Grief isolates. Mourning is like a language, and few are fluent. There are many dialects—I spoke the one involved with losing a mother figure.
About two weeks after her death, all my friends expected that I would be healed. I learned to wash away the night’s tears every morning and paint a smile on my face. To grieve became a burden to all; to some, a sin. And I was thoroughly depraved.
I dreaded the arrival of that Christmas. It would be my first Christmas without my grandmother. I didn’t want to live in a world without her. Mostly I didn’t want to live.
But I dragged myself into the living room on Christmas morning. And I unwrapped—from my parents—a hardcover edition of Thirst.
At that point it had been three years since I’d last read the book. I remembered the last-minute scrawling of the title onto my Christmas list; it was a careless (and miraculous) addition.
I said to my parents, thank you very much. I retreated to my room. I read.
And in the pages of Thirst, I met Mary Oliver for the first time—a woman who was suffering from grief “such as I couldn’t imagine.” Except I could. Finally, someone spoke my language, and for the first time in months, I was not alone.
Mary Oliver was honest. She didn’t degrade me; she didn’t tell me I was “not trusting God enough,” which were the words I was used to hearing. In fact, she faltered, writing an entire portion of a poem on desperate prayers:
I know a lot of fancy words. I tear them from my heart and my tongue. Then I pray. —from Six Recognitions of the Lord, 1.
And she pleaded with God, pouring out herself, begging for mercy and tenderness:
Lord God, mercy is in your hands, pour me a little. And tenderness too. My need is great. —from Six Recognitions of the Lord, 2.
Yet even in her sorrow, she sought His face:
O Lord of melons, of mercy, though I am not ready, nor worthy, I am climbing toward you. —from On Thy Wondrous Works I Will Meditate, 8.
In a way, Mary Oliver’s own discovery of faith, after a lifetime of mysticism, spurred me to rediscover mine. Faith is something I am still rediscovering, still learning day by day.
What I ultimately discovered is what Mary Oliver calls the gift: not to live without grief, but to live with it. My sorrow gives me a unique perspective from which to view the world and to share my experiences. If Mary Oliver’s work lifted me from a period of intense loneliness, perhaps my poetry can do the same for someone else. Grief equips me to be the poet I’m meant to be.
I, too, am a messenger, slowly learning contentment, slowly learning to be dazzled by what God has placed around me in this shroud of existence. While I yearn for something beyond this world, I am writing about hardship, yes, and about futility—the gifts I’ve been given.
And meanwhile, the world is still lovely. Meanwhile, I can still be thankful—for the good, the beautiful, and the difficult, which are, I’m discovering, often the same thing. Meanwhile I can still sing.
Meanwhile God is still so good.
MESSENGER by Mary Oliver
My work is loving the world. Here the sunflowers, there the hummingbird— equal seekers of sweetness. Here the quickening yeast; there the blue plums. Here the clam deep in the speckled sand. Are my boots old? Is my coat torn? Am I no longer young, and still not half-perfect? Let me keep my mind on what matters, which is my work, which is mostly standing still and learning to be astonished. The phoebe, the delphinium. The sheep in the pasture, and the pasture. Which is mostly rejoicing, since all the ingredients are here, which is gratitude, to be given a mind and a heart and these body-clothes, a mouth with which to give shouts of joy to the moth and the wren, to the sleepy dug-up clam, telling them all, over and over, how it is that we live forever.