Every day I see or hear something that more or less kills me with delight, that leaves me like a needle in the haystack of light. It was what I was b… - Mary Oliver

Every day I see or hear something that more or less kills me with delight, that leaves me like a needle in the haystack of light.

Every day
I see or hear
something
that more or less

kills me
with delight,
that leaves me
like a needle

in the haystack
of light.
It was what I was born for–
to look, to listen,

to lose myself
inside this soft world

(from, 'Mindful')

Understand from the first this certainty. Butterflies don’t write books, neither do lilies or violets. Which doesn’t mean they don’t know, in their own way, what they are. That they don’t know they are alive — that they don’t feel, that action upon which all consciousness sits, lightly or heavily. Humility is the prize of the leaf-world. Vainglory is the bane of us, the humans.

I want to sit down on the sand and look around and get dreamy; I want to see what spirits are peeking out of the faces of the roses.

It is no use thinking that writing of poems – the actual writing – can accommodate itself to a social setting, even the most sympathetic social setting of a workshop composed of friends. It cannot. The work improves there and often the will to work gets valuable nourishment and ideas. But, for good reasons, the poem requires of the writer not society or instruction, but a patch of profound and unbroken solitude.