Three poems I am marinating in and one part of Scripture
“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?
(and)
“The Peace of Wild Things” by Wendell Berry
When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
(and)
“How to Prepare for the Second Coming” by Abigail Carroll
Start by recalling the absolute goodness of rain
and repent for every grumble you have ever made
about the weather (this will take approximately
forever.) Next, you will want to commit a theft:
with deft lock-picking and a shrewd hand, steal
back the hours you fed to the hungry god of work,
then squander them on hydrangeas, Wordsworth,
voluntary sidewalk repair. Teach a child to lace
a shoe (your child or another’s—any four-year old
will do), and while you’re at it, set the alarm
for three, and fumble through the dark to the pond
to guard the salamanders as they cross the road. If,
having accomplished these tasks, you wish
to go on, sit at your desk and carefully design
a few radical acts of grace, by which I mean
murder (of a sort): you must willfully, passionately
kill the living, breathing debt owed you by those
who stole your goods, your rights, or the jewel
that was the beating muscle of your hope. Apart
from this, you cannot know the full extent of love.
(For precedent, refer to the cross.) Thrust
your nails into dirt and plant a few seeds (carrots,
radishes, perhaps); indeed, get scandalously intimate
with the earth. After all, it is where you will live
when the lamb lies down with the lion, and the lion
has become your friend. And when the water
of the new world breaks, all is said and done (heaven
and earth made one as the prophets foretold),
you will lose each doubt to a song—which is
a kind of praise —and reap the good you sowed.
Job 12: 7-10
But ask the animals, and they will teach you,
or the birds in the sky, and they will tell you;
or speak to the earth, and it will teach you,
or let the fish in the sea inform you.
Which of all these does not know
that the hand of the Lord has done this?
In his hand is the life of every creature
and the breath of all mankind.
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