the summer day – poem by Mary Oliver

/in , , , /von

Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean-
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating 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 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?

Mary Oliver

Everything is beautiful and I am so sad

/in , , /von
Everything is beautiful
and I am so sad.
This is how the heart makes
a duet of wonder and grief.
The light spraying
through the lace of the fern
is as delicate
as the fibers of memory
forming their web
around the knot in my throat.
The breeze
makes the birds move
from branch to branch
as this ache makes me look
for those I’ve lost
in the next room,
in the next song,
in the laugh
of the next stranger.
In the very center,
under it all,
what we have
that no one can take away
and all that we’ve lost
face each other.
It is there that I’m adrift,
feeling punctured
by a holiness
that exists inside everything.
I am so sad
and everything is beautiful.
by Mark Nepo

Spring – Poem by Mary Oliver

/in , , , /von

Somewhere
a black bear
has just risen from sleep
and is staring

down the mountain.
All night
in the brisk and shallow restlessness
of early spring

I think of her,
her four black fists
flicking the gravel,
her tongue

like a red fire
touching the grass,
the cold water.
There is only one question:

how to love this world.
I think of her
rising
like a black and leafy ledge

to sharpen her claws against
the silence
of the trees.
Whatever else

my life is
with its poems
and its music
and its glass cities,

it is also this dazzling darkness
coming
down the mountain,
breathing and tasting;

all day I think of her -—
her white teeth,
her wordlessness,
her perfect love.

 

Spring – a poem by Mary Oliver