Every Morning by Mary Oliver

how sometimes the camera pauses while a family counts itself, and all of them are alive

Every Morning

by Mary Oliver ¹

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I read the papers,
I unfold them and examine them in the sunlight.
The way the red mortars, in photographs, 
arc down into the neighborhoods 
like stars, the way death
combs everything into a gray rubble before 
the camera moves on. What 
dark part of my soul
shivers: you don't want to know more 
about this. And then: you don't know anything 
unless you do. How the sleepers 
wake and run to the cellars, 
how the children scream, their tongues 
trying to swim away— 
how the morning itself appears 
like a slow white rose
while the figures climb over the bubbled thresholds, 
move among the smashed cars, the streets 
where the clanging ambulances won't 
stop all day-death and death, messy death— 
death as history, death as a habit— 
how sometimes the camera pauses while a family 
counts itself, and all of them are alive, 
their mouths dry caves of wordlessness 
in the smudged moons of their faces, 
a craziness we have so far no name for-
all this I read in the papers, 
in the sunlight,
I read with my cold, sharp eyes.

1. Source: Poetry (March 1986)