The Insensible Light

Your weekly Mary Oliver poem and prompt.

Welcome to Dream Work: A Year-Long Writing Journey with Mary Oliver

In the spirit of immersing myself deeper in the practice and studying of nature poetry,

I am embarking on a year-long writing journey with Mary Oliver, reading a single poem of hers each day and then writing one in response to it.

I’m bringing you along on the journey. Every Sunday, I share a Mary Oliver poem, one of mine I’ve written in response, along with a poetry prompt for you to write your own in conversation with her.

Each week, we will gather in the comments section and share our Mary Oliver inspired poetry with each other.

Photo by Eugene on Unsplash

Everything
Mary Oliver

No doubt in Holland,
when Van Gogh was a boy,
there were swans drifting
over the green sea
of the meadows, and no doubt
on some warm afternoon
he lay down and watched them,
and almost thought: this is everything.
What drove him
to get up and look further
is what saves this world,
even as it breaks
the hearts of men.
In the mines where he preached,
where he studied tenderness,
there were only men, all of them
streaked with dust.
For years he would reach
toward the darkness.
But no doubt, like all of us,
he finally remembered
everything, including the white birds
weightless and unaccountable,
floating around the towns
of grit and hopelessness––
and this is what would finish him:
not the gloom, which was only terrible,
but those last yellow fields, where clearly
nothing in the world mattered, or ever would,
but the insensible light.

© 1990 by Mary Oliver
From her 1990 collection, House of Light, p. 56
Published by Penguin Books 2025 

Wheat Field with Crows painted by Van Gogh, sourced from Britannica.

The Field of Light 
Ash Kilback 

I imagine for years, before you devoted
yourself to the study of how light touches
everything, you had already spent years 
inside the tight grip of darkness. It must
have been the light that kept you living: 
the moon shimmering like a gold coin 
of promise, the sunflower glowing like 
the face of an angel in the vase on your
kitchen table, the dimly-lit cafe terrace 
with the lanterns that gave a familiar 
shape to strange faces and oh those 
irises in the garden, the pooling river
of sunlight swirling in their purple 
mouths just as the day was beginning. 
How could I? You must have thought 
to yourself, Not choose to live another
day when a world this beautiful keeps 
knocking at my door. I wonder if it 
eventually became too much? All 
those hours spent incessantly studying
the light and then your final hour, 
standing beneath the cloudless sky
in the golden wheat field, the color 
of heaven itself and there was nothing
that could stop you from becoming, 
at last, the light you had spent your
whole life searching for. 

This poem was written in conversation with Van Gogh's painting, Wheat Field with Crows. 

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This Week’s Prompt: Ekphrastic Imagining

This week, we’re turning the conversation towards Van Gogh’s painting shared above titled Wheat Fields with Crows. In the same way Mary Oliver does in her poem, Everything, where she imagines Van Gogh across the span of his brief and troubled life and then eventually his tragic death at the age of 37. Van Gogh painted the wheat field landscape in the final weeks of his life and it was the same place he was found with a
fatal gunshot wound.

Write a poem in conversation with this symbolic painting. The detail of the landscape as a portrait of grief, a love letter to Van Gogh in his final days, an imagining of the story he was telling while painting it, or your own imagining of his life.

Come back to the comments on this post Sunday, May 31st and share your poem.

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We Will Be Known as a Culture That Feared Death and Adored Power

P.S. - Come gather in the comments section and give praise to the poets who shared their poems from last week’s prompt on the state of the world inspired by Mary Oliver’s poem, Of the Empire.