Mary Oliver (1935–2019), born on this day in Maple Heights, Ohio, believed poetry belongs to everyone. “When you write a poem, you write it for anybody and everybody,” she said.

With a notebook and a tender attention to the natural world, she translated stillness and birdsong into guidance we could carry in our pockets.

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for American Primitive (1984) and the National Book Award for New and Selected Poems (1992), Oliver wrote of nature, wonder, and the practices that keep a soul awake—walks at dawn, quiet gratitude, listening.

For many years Oliver made her home in Provincetown, Massachusetts, where the dunes and shoreline became her daily companions. Walking the beaches at dawn, she found in the salt air and shifting tides a mirror for the soul’s quiet transformations. With her partner, photographer Molly Malone Cook, she built a life rooted in simplicity and presence by the sea.

Her lines feel like invitations to breathe.

“Poetry is a life-cherishing force. For poems are not words, after all, but fires for the cold, ropes let down to the lost, something as necessary as bread in the pockets of the hungry.” In her work, joy is nourishment—never a scrap—offered so we might live our one wild and precious life more fully.