The Moth, The Mountains, The Rivers

We mourn the loss of the beloved poet Mary Oliver, who died on January 17 at the age of 83. We share here a poem we published in the December 2012/ January 2013 issue of The Progressive.

by

Who can guess the luna’s sadness who

lives so briefly? Who can guess the

impatience of stone longing to be

ground down, to be part again of

something livelier? Who can imagine

in what heaviness the rivers remember

their original clarity?

Strange questions, yet I have spent

worthwhile time with them. And I

suggest them to you also, that your

spirit grow in curiosity, that your

life be richer than it is, that you

bow to the earth as you feel how it

actually is, that we—so clever, and

ambitious, and selfish, and unrestrained—

are only one design of the moving, the

vivacious many.

This poem is from “A Thousand Mornings: Poems” (Penguin Press, New York). Copyright © 2012 Mary Oliver. Reprinted by permission of The Charlotte Sheedy Literary Agency, Inc.