From Jeanne Donley, Lakeville, NY
I turn to the poetic words of Mary Oliver to help me verbalize my thoughts. Nature is her inspiration. I, too, look to nature to better understand what is going on around me. Sometimes Mary shows us how we are not in harmony with each other or with the world we share. Mary Oliver’s poem, “Of The Empire,” is a concise and explicit explanation of the mindset of our present society. I’d like to share it with you…
Of The Empire
We will be known as a culture that feared death
and adored power, that tried to vanquish insecurity
for the few and cared little for the penury of the
many. We will be known as a cuture that taught
and rewarded the amassing of things, that spoke
little if at all about the quality of life for
people (other people), for dogs, for rivers. All
the world, in our eyes, they will say, was a
commodity. And they will say that this structure
was held together politically, which it was, and
they will say also that our politics was no more
than an apparatus to accommodate the feelings of
the heart, and that the heart, in those days,
was small, and hard, and full of meanness.
–Mary Oliver, 2008
This poem appears in Devotions: The Selected Poems of Mary Oliver, 2017, with many other less depressing poems. This book is my touchstone because her poetry connects me to those things that do not change: the rising and setting sun, the ebb and flow of the ocean, the passage of time.
Her poems also remind me that we are all together in a never-ending song of nature. So we must respect, listen, and share with each other, as we do when we stand together to defend what is important to us.
