Is it wrong to wish
Mary Oliver had been my mother?
Is that a sacrilege of some kind?
Probably, and for more than one reason.

​

If attention is the purest form of love,
maybe acceptance of our lives,
the parts we cannot control,
is grace.

​

What would my own mother think?
She was honest and kind
and so often sad and dark.
I was never abused,
but abandoned.
For a time, when I was a small boy,
she was unable to love me.
She wrote me a letter on my thirty-fifth birthday.
to apologize.

​

Mary Oliver’s childhood was a dark place too.
We both went outside
to walk in the woods,
and that became our home.
Because the cliche is true.
Home is where the heart is.

​

Once, much later in life,
walking home from the river
at twilight, an owl
seemingly fell from the sky.
It nearly brushed the hand I held up
to protect my face.
It came that close.

​

It's descent though,
was so graceful,
full of grace,
and silent.
Wings filled with nothing
but silence.

​

And I thought, in the instant the owl soared away,
this it was the answer to a prayer
I made often back then.

​

Let me simply let go
into the mystery.

​

The answer was just being there
to see it,
to feel that presence brush past.

​

A song of praise rose within me,
with the owl,
as it disappeared into the dusk blue of the coming night,

​

Only the earth and the sky, and the light
leaving.
And even that,
a comfort.