By Alliance Communications Coordinator Amy Durr
I love the opportunity to choose the poems for Art of the Week – I get to use my undergraduate English degree with a concentration in American poetry. Finally.
I joke, but poems have gotten me through the most difficult days of my life. I find myself turning to them now as a solace, a remembering, a warning and a sense of community. The Alliance’s commitment to incorporating art, poetry and music as an essential component of sustainability feeds my soul and so many others.
Mary Oliver may be America’s most beloved poet, as The New Yorker suggested in 2019. I didn’t know Oliver until my mid-30s, when a good friend posted a quote by her, one of her many quotes that still proliferate on the Internet. I think it was, “Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” Still an excellent question.
Oliver’s poem Invitation (below) includes another oft-quoted bit:
it is a serious thing
just to be alive
on this fresh morning
in the broken world.
I have these lines copied into my daily journals, and I try to read them every morning. Oliver has such a tender way of mixing the good news with the bad. Even the goldfinches know the world is broken. In fact I’m sure all birds cry out to spread the news of loss of habitat, food sources, nesting sites and disrupted migrations.
And yet it is still a serious thing to be gifted another fresh morning.
Oliver ends with a somewhat oblique quote by Rilke. Elouise Renich Fraser comments, “The line from Rainer Maria Rilke is found at the end of his poem, Archaic Torso of Apollo. There, as here in Mary Oliver’s poem, we’re offered no clear interpretation of ‘You must change your life.’”
If we listen hard enough, I think the goldfinches will lead the way.
Invitation
By Mary Oliver
Oh do you have time
to linger
for just a little while
out of your busy
and very important day
for the goldfinches
that have gathered
in a field of thistles
for a musical battle,
to see who can sing
the highest note,
or the lowest,
or the most expressive of mirth,
or the most tender?
Their strong, blunt beaks
drink the air
as they strive
melodiously
not for your sake
and not for mine
and not for the sake of winning
but for sheer delight and gratitude—
believe us, they say,
it is a serious thing
just to be alive
on this fresh morning
in the broken world.
I beg of you,
do not walk by
without pausing
to attend to this
rather ridiculous performance.
It could mean something.
It could mean everything.
It could be what Rilke meant, when he wrote:
You must change your life.