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# When Death Comes
- URL: https://poetry101.love/when-death-comes/
- Published: 2024-11-23T07:47:13.000Z
- Updated: 2024-12-05T21:13:59.000Z
- Description: by Mary Oliver
- Author: Melissa Anderson
- Tags: Mary Oliver, #Import 2026-11-04 19:11

When death comes  
like the hungry bear in autumn;  
when death comes and takes all the bright coins from his purse

to buy me, and snaps the purse shut;  
when death comes  
like the measle-pox

when death comes  
like an iceberg between the shoulder blades,

I want to step through the door full of curiosity, wondering:  
what is it going to be like, that cottage of darkness?

And therefore I look upon everything  
as a brotherhood and a sisterhood,  
and I look upon time as no more than an idea,  
and I consider eternity as another possibility,

and I think of each life as a flower, as common  
as a field daisy, and as singular,

and each name a comfortable music in the mouth,  
tending, as all music does, toward silence,

and each body a lion of courage, and something  
precious to the earth.

When it's over, I want to say all my life  
I was a bride married to amazement.  
I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.

When it's over, I don't want to wonder  
if I have made of my life something particular, and real.

I don't want to find myself sighing and frightened,  
or full of argument.

I don't want to end up simply having visited this world.

Oliver, Mary. [Devotions: The Selected Poems of Mary Oliver](https://www.google.com/books/edition/Devotions/CusCEAAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=0&kptab=getbook&ref=poetry101.love). United States, Penguin Publishing Group, 2020.

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## Why I chose this poem

So many things to love. As with so many of my Mary Oliver favorites, this articulates and resonates with desires I don't necessarily know how to put words. By experiencing the poetic articulation, I feel an internal clarity of that desire that allows me to open more fully and to live differently. Sometimes [a little differently](https://poetry101.love/when-i-am-among-the-trees/). Sometimes [dramatically](https://hellopoetry.com/poem/5249/the-journey/?ref=poetry101.love).