Day 6: Summer's Day

Because it's actually sunny and summery today, Mary Oliver. 

Mary Oliver is a popular American poet whose poetry focuses on nature and the spiritual. She sees the beauty in days like no one else. 

Her poems are all glorious odes to aspects of nature, like this one 'The Summer's Day.' But more than that, they contain essential truths, spiritual wisdom. Like the infamous ending here, the epiphany inspired by the wonder of nature - "Tell me, what is it you plan to do/with your one wild and precious life?"

Surely this is a revelation that makes you stop and wonder! And that's what all great poems do.  Keep to the forefront of our minds (and hearts) exactly what this life is. And how we should be revelling in and appreciating it. Because it is a gift.

No poet explores this idea more eloquently or beautifully than Mary Oliver. You can read more on her here.

 

The Summer Day - Mary Oliver

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?


(House of Light, Beacon Press, 1990)