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 wind up simply having visited this world.
—Mary Oliver, excerpt from “When Death Comes,” Risking Everything: 110 Poems of Love and Revelation, edited by Roger Housden, p. 4
