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[ 2 poems from Little Alleluias ]
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Flare
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Welcome to the silly, comforting poem.
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It is not the sunrise,
which is a red rinse,
which is flaring all over the eastern sky;
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it is not the rain falling out of the purse of God;
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it is not the blue helmet of the sky afterward,
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or the trees, or the beetle burrowing into the earth;
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it is not the mockingbird who, in his own cadence,
will go on sizzling and clapping
from the branches of the catalpa that are thick with blossoms,
that are billowing and shining,
that are shaking the world.
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The poem is not the world.
It isn’t even the first page of the world.
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But the poem wants to flower, like a flower.
It knows that much.
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It wants to open itself,
like the door of a little temple,
so that you might step inside and be cooled and refreshed,
and less yourself than part of everything.
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When loneliness comes stalking, go into the fields, consider
the orderliness of the world. Notice
something you have never noticed before,
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like the tambourine sound of the snow-cricket
whose pale green body is no longer than your thumb.
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Stare hard at the hummingbird, in the summer rain,
shaking the water-sparks from its wings.
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Let grief be your sister, she will whether or no.
Rise up from the stump of sorrow, and be green also,
like the diligent leaves.
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Scatter your flowers over the graves, and walk away.
Be good-natured and untidy in your exuberance.
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In the glare of your mind, be modest.
And beholden to what is tactile, and thrilling.
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Live with the beetle, and the wind.
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This is the dark bread of the poem.
This is the dark and nourishing bread of the poem.
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Mary Oliver
from Little Alleluias, Grand Central Publishing, New York & Boston; © 2025 by NW Orchard LLC
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Mockingbird
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Always there is something worth saying
about glory, about gratitude.
But I went walking a long time across the dunes
and in all that time spoke not a single word,
nor wrote one down, nor even thought anything at all
at the window of my heart.
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Speechless the snowy tissue of clouds passed over, and more came,
and speechless they passed also.
The beach plums hung on the hillsides, their branches
heavy with blossoms; yet not one of them said a word.
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And nothing there anyway knew, don’t we know, what a word is,
or could parse down from the general liquidity of feeling
to the spasm and bull’s eye of the moment, or the logic,
or the instance,
trimming the fingernails of happiness, entering the house
of rhetoric.
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And yet there was one there eloquent enough,
all this time,
and not quietly but in a rhapsody of reply, though with
an absence of reason, of querulous pestering. The mockingbird
was making of himself
an orchestra, a choir, a dozen flutes,
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a tambourine, an outpost of perfect and exact observation,
all afternoon rapping and whistling
on the athlete’s lung-ful of leafy air. You could not
imagine a steadier talker, hunched deep in a tree,
then floating forth decorative and boisterous and mirthful,
all eye and fluttering feathers. You could not imagine
a sweeter prayer.
Mary Oliver
from Little Alleluias, Grand Central Publishing, New York & Boston; © 2025 by NW Orchard LLC
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We want to catch the mouse in our kitchen. The one who has nibbled a neat hole in the foil around a granola bar and carved its own delicate sculpture as if one of us had taken a single clean bite. The one who leaves a scatter of dark afterthoughts every place we have overlooked a crumb. We want to catch it so we can quit thinking about nibbles and droppings, but we want to catch it alive.
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We want to catch it alive so we don’t have to worry that some evening while playing Scrabble at the kitchen table we will hear death’s sudden and irreversible snap. Alive so we don’t have to open the cupboard under the sink in the morning to a stiff shadow still sleek with gray fur and curled tail. Alive because it is another warm body and we ourselves are guilty of tempting it indoors with warmth and crackers and maybe the sunflower seeds falling from the feeder outside the window.
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But the mouse is smarter than we are. On the first morning we find the live-trap open on its side and empty. Did the mouse panic in its dark enclosure and throw itself against the sides until it tumbled? Or did its mouse companion flip it from outside? The second evening, with tape holding the trap to the shelf, we hear scramble, slide, click as the trapdoor closes. Next morning I carefully carry the trap to the edge of the woods, release the little closure, but it is empty of mouse. All the peanut butter is still present and fragrant but I find incisor marks on the backside of the trap. The mouse has followed its nose to the bait but triggered the trap without entering.
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This morning the trap is taped against the cupboard wall, no way to gnaw it from the back, and its door has snapped shut. I hold the trap’s little cover tight and carry it to the woods. It feels warm. Heavier than an empty trap. I release the door – no mouse. And no peanut butter. Mouse has figured out how to re-open the door even after it shuts and seals.
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Perhaps I will simply place a mouse-sized portion of peanut butter in the cupboard under the sink every night and find a mouse proof box for the granola bars. Maybe that would be smarter.
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In the introduction to Little Alleluias by Mary Oliver, poet Natalie Diaz writes this: It isn’t so crazy to believe that this knowledgeable world imagined us itself, from its own values of life. We young human beings learn from this ancestor how to bloom into our existence, in constellation with and alongside the nonhuman beings of the world. Of consequence to one another.
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In Mary Oliver’s poetry all things live together in consequence to one another: bird and flower, ocean and cloud, woe and joy. She sometimes referred to her poems as “little alleluias” and to herself as poet thus: “I am a woman nearly sixty years old, and glory is my work.” When I have gone too many weeks without reading Mary Oliver, I discover that my carapace has become brittle and dull. I find myself holding sorrow and self-pity close within instead of releasing myself into the sorrow and beauty that is the world. I might even find myself tempted to kill the mouse in my kitchen cupboard. Not today.
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Little Alleluias, collected poetry and prose, gathers poems and essays from the last years of Mary Oliver’s life into a newly released collection. Mary Oliver was born in Ohio in 1935 and died in 2019. Through her life as poet and teacher she won innumerable awards, including the Pulitzer Prize in 1984 for American Primitive, her fourth book. Little Alleluias is available vailable from Grand Central Publishing.
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Other poems by Mary Oliver featured at Verse and Image:
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. . . . . every Friday I present one or two poems I’ve read this week that particularly speak to me;
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V E R S E and I M A G E 
Very true. And not that she ignores the grief and woe of living but somehow makes all of life a…