Pulitzer Prize winner Mary Oliver is a poet from Maple Heights, Ohio. Growing up around nature, Oliver’s poems tend to focus on the connection between human beings and their surroundings, and highlight what we can learn from other living things.
“In Blackwater Woods” is a poem from Oliver’s New and Selected Poems, Volume 1 collection.
Look, the trees
are turning
their own bodies
into pillars
of light,
are giving off the rich
fragrance of cinnamon
and fulfillment,
the long tapers
of cattails
are bursting and floating away over
the blue shoulders
of the ponds,
and every pond,
no matter what its
name is, is
nameless now.
Every year
everything
I have ever learned
in my lifetime
leads back to this: the fires
and the black river of loss
whose other side
is salvation,
whose meaning
none of us will ever know.
To live in this world
you must be able
to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it
against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it
go,
to let it go.
Photo credit: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/mary-oliver
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