As Eddie Fisher catches fire, diamonds draw flame;Scotch tumbles over rims like water in wellsPrecious stones ring; like each pearl string, eight grooms hung bells.Bows on blue-boxed Tiffany tongues thank your name;Mere mortals, fans all, clamor and glamour becomes one same:Celebrity, fashion, light

We will live on a paved street or a roughAlley left between walls, almost forgotten,Or on the bank of a dry river bedWith rose petals running over jagged stone,Or we will live, naked as bees, in a patchworkForest stitched with water drawn from the sky’s groin.Sooner or later we will find ourse

You can’t tell from these cloudswhy this afternoon was set on fireis burning through some lullaby you’re singing to yourselfby gathering a few leaves, some twigsfor the gentleness falling out your mouth —you dead know how it is, each hushmust be buried on the way backwith

I bring you a rosewhich you yourself created!Did you create the roseso that I could bring it,or me, so that Iwould find a roseand bring it to you? So, I give myself and a rose.Thank you for the giftof roses which I give back,with my hands opening. I love your roses and you.Can you smell wh

 I/Blaise Pascal“The silence of these infinite spaces frightens me:The dark dissolves to numbered points and emptiness.I’ve tried to write of it, but the imploding blank Swallows what words I speak, absorbs the light I seek.I prayed. I knelt, but the rings round the plafond shr

Like Pope Francis, Oliver’s poetry invites readers to let the distractions of our modern, constant motion, hyper-stimulated world fall away from time to time, to enter into that quiet place of contemplation and gratitude that waits in the world all around us.