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Mary Oliver Quotes about Summer

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How many mysteries have you seen in your lifetime? How many nets pulled full over the boat's side, each silver body ready or not falling into submission? How many roses in early summer uncurling above the pale sands

How many mysteries have you seen in your lifetime? How many nets pulled full over the boat's side, each silver body ready or not falling into submission? How many roses in early summer uncurling above the pale sands then falling back in unfathomable willingness? And what can you say? Glory to the rose and the leaf, to the seed, to the silver fish. Glory to time and the wild fields, and to joy. And to grief's shock and torpor, its near swoon.

Mary Oliver
Summer, Grief, Fall
Mary Oliver (2017). “Devotions: The Selected Poems of Mary Oliver”, p.132, Penguin

When the blackberries hang swollen in the woods, in the brambles nobody owns, I spend all day among the high branches, reaching my ripped arms, thinking of nothing, cramming the black honey of summer into my mouth; all day my body accepts what it is. In the dark creeks that run by there is this thick paw of my life darting among the black bells, the leaves; there is this happy tongue.

Mary Oliver
Summer, Running, Dark
Mary Oliver (1992). “New and Selected Poems”, Beacon Press (MA)

And there you are on the shore, fitful and thoughtful, trying to attach them to an idea — some news of your own life. But the lilies are slippery and wild—they are devoid of meaning, they are simply doing, from the deepest spurs of their being, what they are impelled to do every summer. And so, dear sorrow, are you.

Mary Oliver
Summer, Thoughtful, Ideas

Oh, yesterday, that one, we all cry out. Oh, that one! How rich and possible everything was! How ripe, ready, lavish, and filled with excitement--how hopeful we were on those summer days, under the clean, white racing clouds. Oh, yesterday!

Mary Oliver
Summer, White, Yesterday
Mary Oliver (2000). “Winter Hours: Prose, Prose Poems, and Poems”, p.28, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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