Why do we wait until someone dies to express our gratitude to them? Oh, Mary Oliver, I should have written you a letter.

I’m not “good” at poetry. I’ve read it and taught it and tried and tried, but I don’t think I have a poetic spirit and then I read someone like Mary Oliver. I can’t say what it is about her poetry that I love. I can open any Mary Oliver volume any day on any page and find something consoling and inspirational. She is always there for me, on my bookshelf, ready to help.

A lifetime ago I was working with a school board and I was asked to deliver a graduation speech at a program for students who were pregnant. They were segregated, and although I recognized the possible need for their segregation, their difficulties in conforming to a regular school schedule and so on, I also felt it was simultaneously terrible. Maybe it was because I grew up in an era when teenage pregnancy was the height of disaster and I didn’t like the idea of these young women being hidden away, if that was what was happening. I thought about that group of young, expectant mothers, and I could not know if they felt supported or judged or somewhere in between. I could not know their future, but I knew I couldn’t make assumptions. Maybe it would be harder than mine was at their age. They would have a child. Or maybe it would be more joyful than mine was at their age because of that same child. Realistically, they might be facing economic hardship, struggle to find work and child care, they might be single parents. It was hard to know what to say.

I turned to Mary Oliver. As always, she knew what to say when I didn’t. I read them, “Wild Geese,” and even now, when I think about that poem in that context, I get teary. Oh, Mary Oliver, thank you for the words.

Today, I open the book Swan: Poems and Prose Poems to the prose poem, “Don’t Hesitate.” The first line reads, “If you suddenly and unexpectedly feel joy, don’t hesitate. Give in to it.” I am sad you are gone, Mary Oliver, but so joyful that you lived. Why do I feel that just maybe my gratitude to Mary Oliver is not too late? Why do I feel that she still might know? Why do I feel that she is flying above me, like the Wild Geese? “Don’t Hesitate” ends with the line, “Joy is not made to be a crumb.” No, it is not.