Mary Oliver as wall art

Even if you don’t think you like Mary Oliver–even if you think you don’t like poetry–you have almost certainly read one of her poems, and you might even have enjoyed it. Mary Oliver is that most rare of all creatures: a poet who makes a living from poetry. She’s a nature poet with an eye for the small details of the world, constantly finding the universe in a grain of pollen. She’s also had her work and parts thereof shared on every social media platform–alone, on pictures, and in video–just about constantly, probably since the internet’s electronic heart first began to beat. And if you still think you don’t know who Mary Oliver is:

Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?

That’s Mary Oliver, from The Summer Day, and if you’re saying you’ve never read it, you’re lying.

However, The Summer Day (much as I love it) isn’t the one I turned into wall art, and neither is What Was Once the Largest Shopping Centre in Northern Ohio Was Built Where There Had Been a Pond I Used to Visit Every Summer Afternoon, though that poem is one of my favourite poems ever.

No. The wall art was taken from Mindful.

Every day
I see or hear
something
that more or less

kills me
with delight,
that leaves me
like a needle

in the haystack
of light.
It was what I was born for –
to look, to listen,

to lose myself
inside this soft world –
to instruct myself
over and over

in joy,
and acclamation.
Nor am I talking
about the exceptional,

the fearful, the dreadful,
the very extravagant –
but of the ordinary,
the common, the very drab,

the daily presentations.
Oh, good scholar,
I say to myself,
how can you help

but grow wise
with such teachings
as these –
the untrimmable light

of the world,
the ocean’s shine,
the prayers that are made
out of grass?

This piece is just a sampler, a bit of muslin on which I practiced different kinds of stitches until I had something I thought was pretty. It was fun and not very difficult and, as is common with embroidery, it took forever. I’ve always meant to make another, larger, better-planned embroidery from another Mary Oliver poem, but somehow there is always something else I’m working on. One day, right?