Lead by Mary Oliver
Lead
Mary OliverHere is a story
to break your heart.
Are you willing?
This winter
the loons came to our harbor
and died, one by one,
of nothing we could see.
A friend told me
of one on the shore
that lifted its head and opened
the elegant beak and cried out
in the long, sweet savoring of its life
which, if you have heard it,
you know is a sacred thing.,
and for which, if you have not heard it,
you had better hurry to where
they still sing.
And, believe me, tell no one
just where that is.
The next morning
this loon, speckled
and iridescent and with a plan
to fly home
to some hidden lake,
was dead on the shore.
I tell you this
to break your heart,
by which I mean only
that it break open and never close again
to the rest of the world.
KEEP READING
SHARED WITH GRATITUDE
This poem appeared in New and Selected Poems by Mary Oliver, published by Beacon Press, 2007. (Available on: Amazon • Bookshop)
DESCRIPTION
“National Book Award – Winner, 1992
Mary Oliver has been writing poetry for nearly five decades, and in that time she has become America’s foremost poetic voice on our experience of the physical world. This collection presents forty-two new poems-an entire volume in itself-along with works chosen by Oliver from six of the books she has published since New and Selected Poems, Volume One.” (Source)
ABOUT MARY OLIVER
Mary Oliver was born and raised in Maple Hills Heights, a suburb of Cleveland, Ohio. Oliver’s poetry won numerous awards, including the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award and a Lannan Literary Award for lifetime achievement. Her last books included A Thousand Mornings (2012), Dog Songs (2013), Blue Horses (2014), Felicity (2015), Upstream: Selected Essays (2016), and Devotions: The Selected Poems of Mary Oliver (2017). Oliver lived in Provincetown, Massachusetts, and Hobe Sound,… (more)
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ENDNOTES
- Explore other works in pursuit of: nature • grief • awakening • Or browse the index
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