Poetry Corner

Black Bear

by Mary Oliver

Now comes black bear into the field. His mouth hangs open just a little. His bulk twitches in the long grass.

Listen, black bear, I say: Do you get it?

We have created cities!

We have weapons you will not ever imagine, or understand.

We build machines that fly, that plough the great waters.

Bear’s eyes flicker. His nose pinches the air. He does not care what I say.

He does not hear even a scrap of it.

He is listening only to the perfection of his own life.

Oh, black bear, soften me with your immutable disdain.

About the poet: Mary Oliver was born on September 10, 1935, in Maple Heights, Ohio. She lived briefly, as a teenager, in the home of Edna St. Vincent Millay in Austerlitz, New York, where she helped Millay’s family sort through the papers the poet left behind. In the mid-1950s, Oliver attended both Ohio State University and Vassar College, though she did not receive a degree from either.

Her first collection of poems, No Voyage, and Other Poems, was published in 1965. She went on to publish more than fifteen collections of poetry, including New and Selected Poems, Volume One (1992), which won the National Book Award for Poetry, and American Primitive (1983), for which she won the Pulitzer Prize.

Oliver, who cited Walt Whitman as an influence, is best known for her awe-filled, often hopeful, reflections on and observations of nature. One reviewer wrote, “Mary Oliver’s poetry is an excellent antidote for the excesses of civilization…” She held the Catharine Osgood Foster Chair for Distinguished Teaching at Bennington College (Vermont) until 2001. She lived for over forty years in Provincetown, Massachusetts, with her partner Molly Malone Cook. After Cook’s death in 2005, Oliver moved to the southeastern coast of Florida, where she died of cancer at the age of 83 in Hobe Sound, Florida, on January 17, 2019.