How detailed and hopeful, how exact everything is in the light,

Mary Oliver, from Dream Work

We shake with joy, we shake with grief. What a time they have, these two housed as they are in the same body.

Mary Oliver, “We Shake with Joy”

all eternity is in the moment

Mary Oliver, from “Seven White Butterflies”

If no one else got me I know Mary Oliver got me

“El gatito” traducción del poema “The kitten” de Mary Oliver, tr. por Eleonora González Capria. (Poema original debajo)

once two people have a connection, they will always be connected. it doesn't matter if they end up hating each other because as time goes on it erodes away the hatred and all that there will be left

is love

it'll always be love

I have just found your blog and absolutely adore it! thank you so much for everything you're doing <3 i was wondering if you had any poems about connecting with nature?

hi and thank YOU for reading & supporting my blog! here are previous compilations i’ve made on nature. here are some more poems for you to enjoy. admittedly they’re mostly Mary Oliver, but i feel like few poets capture nature like she does.

Mary Oliver, “Invitation” | it is a serious thing / just to be alive / on this fresh morning / in the broken world.

Mary Oliver, “How I Go to the Woods” | I can sit / on the top of a dune as motionless as an uprise of weeds, / until the foxes run by unconcerned. I can hear the almost / unhearable sound of the roses singing.

Mary Oliver, “Sleeping in the Forest” | I thought the earth remembered me, / she took me back so tenderly

Mary Oliver, “October” | Look, I want to love this world / as though it’s the last chance I’m ever going to get / to be alive / and know it

Mary Oliver, “The Sun” | do you think there is anywhere, in any language, / a word billowing enough / for the pleasure / that fills you, / as the sun / reaches out

Louise Glück, “Vespers” | I planted the seeds, I watched the first shoots / like wings tearing the soil, and it was my heart / broken by the blight

Wendell Berry, “The Peace of Wild Things” | I come into the presence of still water. / And I feel above me the day-blind stars / waiting with their light

Mary Makofske, “Planting the Meadow” | No voice calls me to order / as I enter a dream of meadow, kneel / to earth and, moving east to west, second / the motion only of the sun

Margaret Gibson, “Riverkeeper” | To bloom must feel / like a river’s brightening at daybreak, / or a slow kiss, a throb in the elapse of time

hello! do you have any poems about two people who are in love but they don't show it/or not together? thank you for running this blog. i just found this tumblr and this made my day <3

hi anon! thank you for your request and your kind words. it’s really funny because i just got 2 other requests in a row very similar to yours, so i’m kind of collating them all together because unsurprisingly these highly specific requests are very difficult to find poems for. here are some poems about either long-distance love or concealed love. enjoy reading!

Mary Oliver, “Little Crazy Love Song” | Softly my right hand fondles my left hand / as though it were you.

Edna St. Vincent Millay, “Witch-Wife” | But she was not made for any man, / And she never will be all mine.

Anne Sexton, “Small Wire” | Love and a cough / cannot be concealed. / Even a small cough. / Even a small love.

e. e. cummings, “[i carry your heart with me(i carry it in]” | i carry your heart with me(i carry it in / my heart)i am never without it(anywhere / i go you go,my dear

Craig Santoz Perez, “Love in a Time of Climate Change” | I love you without knowing how or when this world / will end. I love you organically, without pesticides.

Rainer Maria Rilke, “[Again and again, even though we know love’s landscape]” | again and again the two of us walk out together / under the ancient trees, lay ourselves down again and again / among the flowers, and look up into the sky.

Reginald Shepherd, “You, Therefore” | home is nowhere, therefore you, / a kind of dwell and welcome, song after all, / and free of any eden we can name

“This is what I have. The dull hangover of waiting, the blush of my heart on the damp grass, the flower-faced moon.”

—Mary Oliver, from blue horses

Mary Oliver "Wild Geese" // Andrea Gibson "I Sing the Body Electric, Especially When My Power's Out" // Richard Siken "The Way the Light Reflects" // Ivan Coyote Tomboy Survival Guide // Andrea Gibson "I Sing the Body Electric, Especially When My Power's Out"

from 'Owls and Other Fantasies'

"I want to think again of dangerous and noble things.

I want to be light and frolicsome.

I want to be improbable beautiful and afraid of nothing,

as though I had wings.”

[Mary Oliver]

my phones full of notifications

but none of them are from you

rip mary oliver you would have loved cottage core

“There is so much communication and understanding beneath and apart from the substantiations of language spoken out or written down that language is almost no more than a compression, or elaboration—an exactitude, declared emphasis, emotion-in-syntax—not at all essential to the message. And therefore, as an elegance, as something almost superfluous, it is likely (because it is free to be so used) to be carefully shaped, to take risks, to begin and even prolong adventures that may turn out poorly after all—and all in the cause of the crisp flight and the buzzing bliss of the words, as well as their directive—to make, of the body-bright commitment to life, and its passions, including (of course!) the passion of meditation, an exact celebration, or inquiry, employing grammar, mirth, and wit in a precise and intelligent way. Language is, in other words, not necessary, but voluntary. If it were necessary, it would have stayed simple; it would not agitate our hearts with ever-present loveliness and ever-cresting ambiguity; it would not dream, on its long white bones, of turning into song.”

– from Three Songs by Mary Oliver (taken from West Wind: Poems and Prose Poems)

celestial lover / Mary Oliver, "I don’t want to live a small life" from Red Bird / Richard Siken, Crush; from ‘Saying Your Names’

you know every night before i go to sleep 

i double check that i’ve left my ringer on 

just in case you change your mind 

“Is the soul solid, like iron? Or is it tender and breakable, like the wings of a moth in the beak of the owl? Who has it, and who doesn’t? I keep looking around me. The face of the moose is as sad as the face of Jesus.”

— Mary Oliver, excerpt from “Some Questions You Might Ask”, in Devotions

“it is a serious thing just to be alive on this fresh morning in this broken world.”

— Mary Oliver

there will be night where i smile

there will be nights where i cry

there will be nights where i wish we never said goodbye

Every morning I walk like this around the pond, thinking: if the doors of my heart ever close, I am as good as dead. Every morning, so far, I'm alive. And now the crows break off from the rest of the darkness and burst up into the sky—as though all night they had thought of what they would like their lives to be, and imagined their strong, thick wings.”

Mary Oliver, Dream Work