You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your kn… for a hundred miles through the de… You only have to let the soft anim… love what it loves.

Hello, sun in my face. Hello, you who make the morning and spread it over the fields and into the faces of the tulips and the nodding morning glories,

One day you finally knew what you had to do, and began, though the voices around you kept shouting their bad advice—

Every morning the world is created. Under the orange sticks of the sun

At Blackwater Pond the tossed wat… after a night of rain. I dip my cupped hands. I drink a long time. It tastes like stone, leaves, fire. It falls…

Have you ever seen anything in your life more wonderful than the way the sun,

Don’t bother me. I’ve just been born. The butterfly’s loping flight carries it through the country of…

I’d seen their hoofprints in the deep needles and knew they ended the long night under the pines, walking

Who made the world? Who made the swan, and the black b… Who made the grasshopper? This grasshopper, I mean– the one who has flung herself out…

All winter the water has crashed over the cold the cold sand. Now it breaks over the thin branch of your body.

Needing one, I invented her— the great-great-aunt dark as hicko… called Shining-Leaf, or Drifting… or The-Beauty-of-the-Night. Dear aunt, I’d call into the leav…

The spirit likes to dress up like this: ten fingers, ten toes, shoulders, and all the rest

Today again I am hardly myself. It happens over and over. It is heaven-sent. It flows through me like the blue wave.

There is, all around us, this country of original fire. You know what I mean. The sky, after all, stops at nothi…

My work is loving the world. Here the sunflowers, there the hum… equal seekers of sweetness. Here the quickening yeast; there t… Here the clam deep in the speckled…