Three Pearls from Mary Oliver

Some poems are long, filling up a page, or an entire afternoon. But other poems are wonderfully short, like little gems, lustrous beauty wrapped around a single grain of sand.

Here are three such pearls from Mary Oliver.

“So Every Day”

So every day
I was surrounded by the beautiful crying forth
of the ideas of God,

One of which was you.

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“The Uses of Sorrow”

Someone I loved once gave me
a box full of darkness.

It took me years to understand
that this, too, was a gift.

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“The Storm (Bear)”

Now through the white orchard my little dog
romps, breaking the new snow
with wild feet.
Running here running there, excited,
hardly able to stop, he leaps, he spins
until the white snow is written upon
in large, exuberant letters,
a long sentence, expressing
the pleasures of the body in this world.
Oh, I could not have said it better
myself.

+ Mary Oliver