it was a dark and stormy night

Mary Oliver, from "Good Morning" in Blue Horses

Mary Oliver, from "Sand Dabs, Five"

Mary Oliver, from "Little Owl that Lives in The Orchard" in Devotions: Selected Poems

Mary Oliver, from "Lilies" in House of Light: Poems

Mary Oliver, from “Sleeping in the forest”

Mary Oliver, from Serengeti

Mary Oliver, from "Thirst" in Devotions

DECEM-BIRD Day 18-Canada Goose (words from Wild Geese by Mary Oliver of course)

Mary Oliver, from "Moon and Water"

Mary Oliver, from "Doesn't Every Poet Write A Poem About Unrequited Love?", in Thirst

Mary Oliver, A Poetry Handbook: A Prose Guide to Understanding and Writing Poetry

Mary Oliver, "When I Am Among the Trees"

Mary Oliver, from "Peonies"

Mary Oliver, from a poem titled "When I Am Among The Trees," featured in Devotions: Poems

Softest of mornings, hello. And what will you do today, I wonder, to my heart? And how much honey can the heart stand, I wonder, before it must break? This is trivial, or nothing: a snail climbing a trellis of leaves and the blue trumpets of flowers. No doubt clocks are ticking loudly all over the world. I don’t hear them. The snail’s pale horns extend and wave this way and that as her fingers-body shuffles forward, leaving behind the silvery path of her slime. Oh, softest of mornings, how shall I break this? How shall I move away from the snail, and the flowers? How shall I go on, with my introspective and ambitious life?