My Mary Oliver Poems #3 - "The Kookaburras"

The Kookaburras


In every heart there is a coward and a procrastinator.

In every heart there is a god of flowers, just waiting

to come out of its cloud and lift its wings.

The kookaburras, kingfishers, pressed against the edge of

their cage, they asked me to open the door.

Years later I wake in the night and remember how I said to them,

no, and walked away.

They had the brown eyes of soft-hearted dogs.

They didn't want to do anything so extraordinary, only to fly

home to their river.

By now I suppose the great darkness has covered them.

As for myself, I am not yet a god of even the palest flowers.

Nothing else has changed either.

Someone tosses their white bones to the dung-heap.

The sun shines on the latch of their cage.

I lie in the dark, my heart pounding.


As I walked through Devotions, “The Kookaburras” caught my attention because it was much darker than the two poems I’ve already looked at – heavy and haunted with guilt and regret. It felt almost like a confession. Oliver begins her poem with an astute observation of the contents of every heart (human and animal alike.) She observes: “In every heart there is a coward and a procrastinator. In every heart there is a god of flowers, just waiting to come out of its cloud and lift its wings” (p. 31). I was struck by this line because it speaks to a kindred connection between each heart that beats, and it drills down to the core of our nature, laying bare both the ugly and the beautiful. Oliver expresses her deep regret over looking into a cage of kookaburras – seeing them pressed up against the edge of their confinement, their “brown eyes of soft-hearted dogs,” and recognizing that “they didn’t want to do anything so ordinary, only to fly home to their river” – and leaving them trapped. She’s haunted by the guilt of ignoring their plea to open the door, of moving on to let them eventually be swallowed up by the great darkness.

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