The Summer Day
by: 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?
As a Catholic school boy, I can answer Oliver's first question easily: Who made the world?
Answer: God made the world.
Now, in the catechism I studied, the next question would probably be: Who is God?
And the answer would be: God is the supreme being who made all things.
Of course, Oliver's answer to that first query is a little less dogmatic and little more beautiful. She asks additional questions. Gives us a grasshopper eating sugar from the palm of her hand. Tells us that she is idle and blessed because she knows that life is brief as a birthday candle, and soon her flame will be disappear in a breath of wind. Finally, Oliver asks her last question, the one to which the rest of the poem seems prelude:
"Tell me, what is it you plan to do / with your one wild and precious life?"
There it is. We're all given one wild and precious life on this planet, and it's up to us to make it extraordinary. Or ordinary. Or messy. Or miraculous. Those are all options. Tonight, I stepped into my backyard right around twilight, which is one of my favorite times of day. I love to watch the sky deepen and stars wink on. There was a chill in the air, and it felt like an ending and a beginning. Summer being ushered out, and autumn crowding in.
For Oliver, a twilight moment like that may impart just enough meaning into her wild and precious life. She would kneel in the grass, under the just-appearing stars, and feel the peace of wild things (thanks, Wendell Berry, for that phrase). Oliver's a poet, and her job is to . . . notice.
I am well into the second or third act of my life. I've worked in a bookstore and outpatient surgery center. I've been a college English professor for going on 30 years. I work in a library now. Write poetry daily. Love my kids and wife and friends exponentially. I . . . am . . . blessed.
That's enough.
If the Swedish Academy awarded me the Nobel Prize in Literature, that would be enough. If Pope Francis canonized me tomorrow, that would be enough, too. If Mary Oliver's ghost visited me in the middle of the night. If my wife cooked me a batch of chocolate chip cookies. If Obi-Wan Kenobi made me a Jedi Knight. Enough, enough, and enough.
It's all about living in the moment and being grateful for whatever happens.
Tonight, Saint Marty's wild and precious life was blessed by the ribs of a pine tree against a dusky blue sky.
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❤️
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