A Note of Optimism

Another Mary Oliver poem (read by our rabbi Esther) from her book Evidence, which I just purchased.

Halleluiah by Mary Oliver

Everyone should be born into this world happy

   and loving everything.

But in truth it rarely works that way.

For myself, I have spent my life clamoring toward it.

Halleluiah, anyway I’m not where I started!

And have you too been trudging like that, sometimes

   almost forgetting how wonderful the world is

      and how miraculously kind some people can be?

And have you too decided that nothing important

   is ever easy?

Not, say, for the first sixty years.

Halleluiah, I’m sixty now, and even a little more,

and some days I feel I have wings.