If you’ve ever loved and lost a favorite person, pet, or thing, this poem’s instructions may help. The last nine lines of Mary Oliver’s 36-line poem, In Blackwater Woods, instruct us on how to live in this world by being able to do three things.
In Blackwater Woods
by Mary Oliver
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.
— American Primitive by Mary Oliver © Back Bay Books, 1983.
Mary Oliver’s most acclaimed volume of poetry, American Primitive contains fifty visionary poems about nature, the humanity in love, and the wilderness of America, both within our bodies and outside. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry.
Read more about America’s most beloved poet complied in this Remembrance of Mary Oliver (1935-2019) and her astonishing poetry. It contains links to articles, interviews, and poetry readings, as well as many of her favorite poems I’ve loved and posted over the years.
— Written and compiled (citing sources) by Ken Chawkin for The Uncarved Blog.
Tags: how to live, how to love, in blackwater woods, loss, mortality, poet mary oliver
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