Earlier this week, on the 10th, Mary Oliver celebrated her birthday.
This talented poet shares my birthday month and my father’s birthday year (1935). She and my father have another commonality: they are both gifted poets. He, however, set down his pen years ago. His writings were mostly kept hidden from the world, and when arson claimed our home at the end of 2006, every last one of them turned to ash.
Of all the things my parents lost in that fire — wedding photos, my mom’s music-box and Storybook doll collections, our manual typewriter — I consider the biggest casualty my father’s writings. How I would love to sit with them now, poring over the pages of the love letters he once wrote my mother, and all his other meanderings that made it onto the page, if not into the wider world.
In honor of the words my father likely will never have the opportunity to bring to light, and for those pieces of the sacred talent he’s passed on to me, and in honor, too, of the birthday month and year we share with Mary Oliver, here’s a slice of her beautiful ruminations; interior thoughts not hidden, not burned, but offered up with the intention, perhaps, of saving a life or two.
One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and began,
though the voices around you
kept shouting
their bad advice —
though the whole house
began to tremble
and you felt the old tug
at your ankles.
“Mend my life!”
each voice cried.
But you didn’t stop.
You knew what you had to do,
though the wind pried
with its stiff fingers
at the very foundations,
though their melancholy
was terrible.
It was already late
enough, and a wild night,
and the road full of fallen
branches and stones.
But little by little,
as you left their voices behind,
the stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice
which you slowly
recognized as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do
the only thing you could do —
determined to save
the only life you could save.
One of my favorite poems by one of my favorite poets. We have so much in common, we writermama pals – September, writing, motherhood, and Mary Oliver. Keep listening to that inner voice that is there to save you.
Peace,
Mary