At a seminar I attended recently a speaker referred to the poet Mary Oliver, as the "hospice poet". Not sure about that, but I think she does have some interesting and thoughful (maybe thought provoking) poems about life and death, which is a glowing recommendation coming from me - a person who is not always a big poetry fan.
According to the Wikipedia article Mary Oliver, lived in the home of another well known American poet Edna St. Vincent Millay, for a short time as a teenager - helping organize Edna's papers. I'm not sure if the two poets ever met since Edna St. Vincent Millay died in 1950 when Mary Oliver was 15 years old, but I believe you can see similarities in their styles - perhaps because Mary Oliver read and studied Edna St. Vincent Millay's works.
Mary Oliver's most famous poem may be "Wild Geese".
"Wild Geese"
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting -
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.
Source: Mary Oliver Poetry Selections on Allspirit which also includes the poems:
~ Mockingbirds
~ The Buddha's Last Instruction
~ The Summer Day
~ Moccasin Flowers
~ When Death Comes
~ The Journey
I found her poem "A Visitor" to be sad and also hopeful. Even though the daughter was unable to love her father in life she is able to forgive and see something to love in her dreams of him after he has died. Too late for the father maybe - but still time for the daughter to let go of whatever it was that drove them apart.
"A Visitor"
My father, for example,
who was young once
and blue-eyed,
returns
on the darkest of nights
to the porch and knocks
wildly at the door,
and if I answer
I must be prepared
for his waxy face,
for his lower lip
swollen with bitterness.
And so, for a long time,
I did not answer,
but slept fitfully
between his hours of rapping.
But finally there came the night
when I rose out of my sheets
and stumbled down the hall.
The door fell open
and I knew I was saved
and could bear him,
pathetic and hollow,
with even the least of his dreams
frozen inside him,
and the meanness gone.
And I greeted him and asked him
into the house,
and lit the lamp,
and looked into his blank eyes
in which at last
I saw what a child must love,
I saw what love might have done
had we loved in time.
Source: Poemhunter.com - All poems of Mary Oliver
You can listen to Mary Oliver read, and talk about, some of her poems on the
Lannan Foundation archive page.
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