Frenemies, Part IV
I used to hate poetry universally, but over the years I’ve *slowly* come to *occasionally* appreciate the way poets are able to articulate ideas and emotions I’m dispossessed of words to properly express. From time to time I’ll be grabbing coffee with a friend—trying to piece together a word of encouragement, or struggling to properly explain my hot mess of a life, or failing to put words to gratitude or hope or pain—and a snippet of a poem will come to mind, an epiphany, a perfect encapsulation of empathy I could never achieve on my own. I’m stopped dead in my tracks at the significance of pronounced emotion, and I’m grateful for the staggering power of the written word.
Today I’m feelin When Death Comes by Mary Oliver, and want to celebrate it here.
You can read more about my reluctant friendship with poetry here, and you can see more poems I love to not hate here.
* * *
When death comes
like the hungry bear in autumn;
when death comes and takes all the bright coins from his purse
to buy me, and snaps the purse shut;
when death comes
like the measle-pox
when death comes
like an iceberg between the shoulder blades,
I want to step through the door full of curiosity, wondering:
what is it going to be like, that cottage of darkness?
And therefore I look upon everything
as a brotherhood and a sisterhood,
and I look upon time as no more than an idea,
and I consider eternity as another possibility,
and I think of each life as a flower, as common
as a field daisy, and as singular,
and each name a comfortable music in the mouth,
tending, as all music does, toward silence,
and each body a lion of courage, and something
precious to the earth.
When it's over, I want to say all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.
When it's over, I don't want to wonder
if I have made of my life something particular, and real.
I don't want to find myself sighing and frightened,
or full of argument.
I don't want to end up simply having visited this world
—Mary Oliver