Today's the birthday of Mary Oliver, a poet whom I like. Someone recommended her to me about two years ago and I bought a slim volume of her poems titled Evidence.
She had me with the very first poem "Yellow:"
"There is the heaven we enter
through institutional grace
and there are yellow finches bathing and singing
in the lowly puddle."
This brief poem promised that Mary Oliver was a poet after my own heart, one who finds God in the world around her. In "It Was Early," after describing meeting mice and mink and pines, she writes:
"Sometimes I need
only to stand
wherever I am
to be blessed."
Her poetry itself opens my eyes to the Divine in simple things. I envy her ability to express it so simply. Since it's her birthday, I'll include the last two lines from "Halleluiah:"
"Halleluiah, I'm sixty now, and even a little more,
and some days I feel I have wings."
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