I listened (again) last week to Krista Tippett’s interview with poet Mary Oliver, and Oliver talked about how as she got older, her poems got shorter. “But if you can say it in a few lines, you’re just decorating for the rest of it,” she said.
Seeking poems for the poetry box has made me aware of how rare and powerful a tiny poem can be. I need something short enough to be read during a pause in a walk, short enough to be printed in a font that can be read from the curb. The search is training my eye differently.
This poem by Leonard Nathan is 14 lines like a sonnet. It’s one of those I come across every few years, and reading it now, it seems to align well with Oliver’s famous lines, “Tell me, what is it you plan to do / with your one wild and precious life?”
“You’ve been given just the one life
in this world that matters”
