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# Black Oaks
- URL: https://poetry101.love/black-oaks/
- Published: 2022-10-30T17:59:56.000Z
- Updated: 2023-10-11T00:50:24.000Z
- Description: by Mary Oliver
- Author: Melissa Anderson
- Tags: Mary Oliver, #Import 2026-11-04 19:11

Okay, not one can write a symphony, or a dictionary,  
 or even a letter to an old friend, full of remembrance  
 and comfort.

Not one can manage a single sound though the blue jays  
 carp and whistle all day in the branches, without  
 the push of the wind.

But to tell the truth after a while I’m pale with longing  
 for their thick bodies ruckled with lichen

and you can’t keep me from the woods, from the tonnage  
 of their shoulders, and their shining green hair.

Today is a day like any other: twenty-four hours, a  
 little sunshine, a little rain.

Listen, says ambition, nervously shifting her weight from  
 one boot to another — why don’t you get going?

For there I am, in the mossy shadows, under the trees.

And to tell the truth I don’t want to let go of the wrists  
 of idleness, I don’t want to sell my life for money,  
 I don’t even want to come in out of the rain.

Oliver, Mary. [A Thousand Mornings: Poems](https://www.google.com/books/edition/A%5FThousand%5FMornings/dCGMDQAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=0&kptab=getbook&ref=poetry101.love). India, Penguin Publishing Group, 2013.

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### Why I Chose this Poem

I am so intrigued by the sensation, " to tell the truth I don’t want to let go of the wrists / of idleness." I wrap fingers around my own wrist. Just that, and then imagine myself as idleness. Holding myself in idleness in the first season of a year where I am not selling my life for money, when the rains have just returned. The lichen glow with with the rains, the mornings are dressed in mist, and the oaks are beginning to let go of their leaves.