A Thousand Mornings by Mary Oliver

Mary Oliver and I seem to have one thing in common: we both love the ocean, as you can see in her short poem, The Poet Compares Human Nature to the Ocean From Which We Came:

The ocean can do craziness, it can do smooth

it can lie down like silk breathing

or toss havoc shoreward;  it can give

gifts or withhold all; it can rise, ebb, froth

like an incoming frenzy of fountains, or it can

sweet-talk entirely. As I can too,

and so, no doubt, can you, and you.

Or the poem Tides:

Every day the sea

blue gray green lavender

pulls away leaving the harbor’s

dark cobbled undercoat.

But that is apparently where our similarity ends, Mary’s and mine, because she can put into words those feelings whereas I can’t. I’m not a poetry lover, generally, but Susan and I were introduced to Mary Oliver via a Beth Kephart book and Susan became an avid fan. I like simple poetry, short poetry, poetry that conveys thoughts and feelings in a sparsity of words. Maybe that’s why I like Mary Oliver.

In A Thousand Mornings, she discusses age, life, joyfulness, sorrow, dissatisfaction such as In Traveling to Beautiful Places she says

…But it’s late for all of us,

in truth the only ship there is

is the ship we are all on

burning the world as we go.

Whatever it is about the way Mary Oliver expresses her thoughts and feelings, she seems, in many ways, to have captured mine, as well. See if Ms. Oliver captures your feelings.