Thoughts on Three Poems

Was just struck by this piece of a piece of Yehoshua November's poem, Two Worlds Exist:

When I was younger,
I believed that the mystical teachings
could erase sorrow. The mystical teachings
do not erase sorrow.
They say, here is your life.
What will you do with it?

It brought to mind this excerpt from a Mary Oliver Poem:

I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?

I'm not sure what more we can ask from a poet than to prompt us to answer what we will do with our life which is, or can be, so many things, including sorrowful, wild, and precious.

And that reminds me of another quotable piece from a longer poem:

“It is difficult
to get the news from poems
yet men die miserably every day
for lack
of what is found there”

-William Carlos Williams