By Bruce Smith
One of my favorite poets is Mary Oliver. Her poems often convey a sense of the wonder of life, its creatures, and the natural world. Many address deeper issues of God, mortality and our relationship to creation with a reverent but light touch that I’ve found particularly endearing. This week I want to share one that seem whose final lines struck me.
The Summer Day
Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
The grasshopper, I mean------
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is easting sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down ----
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes,
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don’t know exactly what 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?
From Devotions by Mary Oliver