Mary Oliver

Alohi--my beautiful friend with the most perfect sense of timing--sent me this poem a couple days ago. She, I and 40 other college students took part in a study-abroad program in 1999. We loaded on the bus at 4:30 am one December morning to drive a couple hours to the airport for our marathon flight home. Bleary-eyed, nostalgic and over-whelmed by soon-to-be-assuaged-homesickness, the bus was silent, each one buried in reminiscence (or just asleep). Then our friend Wenzel stood up and read this poem to the silent bus.

Seven years later, many of us still consider it one of the most moving moments of the whole life-changing trip.

“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.