A Poem from my time in Italy

I spent 2 semesters in Italy during 2002-2003. Everyday Father Bruno would publish a newsletter and usually include some form of art work or prose in it. Here is a poem that I remembered today:

I want to step through the door full of curiosity, wondering:
what is it going to like, that cottage of darkness?

And therfore I look upon everything
as a brotherhood and a sisterhood,
and I look upon time as no more than an idea,
and I consider eternity as another possibility

and I think of each life as a flower, as common
as a field of daisy, and as a singular,

and each name a comfortable music in the mouth,
tending, as all music does, toward silence,

and each body a lion of courage, and something
precious on earth.

When it's over, I want to say: all my life
I was a bride married to amazement
I was a 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 end up simply having visited the world.

--Mary Oliver