The Gardener by Mary Oliver
The Gardener
by Mary Oliver
Have I lived enough?
Have I loved enough?
Have I considered Right Action enough, have I
come to any conclusions?
Have I experienced happiness with sufficient gratitude?
Have I endured loneliness with grace?
I say this, or perhaps I’m just thinking it.
Actually, I probably think too much.
Then I step out into the garden,
where the gardener, who is said to be a simple man,
is tending his children, the roses.
I believe poets have the capacity to ask the beautiful question, and Mary Oliver is one of the most wonderful beautiful question askers in existence. I’ve though much on the early lines of this poem, letting them sink into my being. And I love that the answering, in the style of Rilke’s living one’s way into the questions, is the stepping into the garden and witnessing the gardener, “said to be a simple man”, tending…and in it, he renders these beautiful questions simultaneously relevant and irrelevant at the same time, both/and.
This is from Mary Oliver's A Thousand Mornings (Penguin Press, 2012), her twentieth book, written in her mid-seventies in the years after her partner Molly Malone Cook's death in 2005.
