THE PLEA

A Reply in Verse to Mary Oliver's "THE GIFT"

THE GIFT¹

by Mary Oliver

Be still, my soul, and steadfast.
Earth and heaven both are still watching
though time is draining from the clock
and your walk, that was confident and quick,
has become slow.

So, be slow if you must, but let
the heart still play its true part. 
Love still as once you loved, deeply
and without patience. Let God and the world
know you are grateful.
That the gift has been given.

THE PLEA

by Michael D. Warden

But where does your
heart go when love fails?
What part ought it
play when, as far as you can tell, heaven
no longer kisses the earth,
and whatever joy it once found in
common wonders—the way the sun
makes diamonds on the lake, the way
the flowers kiss the air, the infinite 
portal in the eye of a doe—are all
lost to you, consumed like delicate
arias in the fevered roar
of human greed,
and God is lost somewhere
in the bitterness of the everything
that men have made?

That I could love as 
I once loved, deeply
and without patience, is no dreamy
sentiment for me now.
It is a cry, a plea, a desperate
grasping for an all but forgotten
grace I no longer see on
the Earth.

Pray for me, Mary,
that I may be found faithful
to the good true beautiful things,
as you were to the holiness of the
flowers and the ponds and the
eyes of the mystic deer
whom we both know were the eyes of God.
Pray that even if the whole world falls and
the hearts of all men everywhere succumb 
to selfishness and hate,
that I will still, quietly, every morning,
set myself ablaze with love, impatiently 
burn to give this gift,
like a candle calling to the dawn,
like a signal fire summoning
heaven's swift and sure return.

1. From Devotions: The Selected Poems of Mary Oliver.