What is the Greatest Gift?

What is the greatest gift?
Could it be the world itself—the oceans, the meadowlark,
the patience of the trees in the wind?
Could it be love, with its sweet clamor of passion?

Something else—something else entirely holds me in thrall.
That you have a life that I wonder about
more than I wonder about my own.
That you have a life—courteous and intelligent—that
I wonder about more than I wonder about my own.
That you have a soul—your own, no one else's—that
I wonder about more than I wonder about my own.
So that I find my soul clapping its hands for yours more than my own.

Mary Oliver, from Red Bird: Poems
published by Beacon Press