The poem in which the reader does not feel himself or herself a participant is a lecture, listened to from an uncomfortable chair, in a stuffy room, … - Mary Oliver

When it's over, I want to say: all my life I was a bride married to amazement. — from WHEN DEATH COMES

Now that I’m free to be myself, who am I?

Still, what I want in my life
is to be willing
to be dazzled — to cast aside the weight of facts

and maybe even
to float a little
above this difficult world.
I want to believe I am looking

into the white fire of a great mystery.
I want to believe that the imperfections are nothing — that the light is everything — that it is more than the sum
of each flawed blossom rising and falling. And I do.