by Michael Winters
For Christmas, I received a copy of Mary Oliver’s poetry collection, Devotions. I’d like to share here what is probably her most famous poem, “The Summer Day.” I bet you’ve heard the last two lines even if you didn’t know from where they came.
“The Summer Day” by Mary Oliver:
Who made the world?
Who made the swan, 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?
There’s so much to reflect on here. Between her first question about the Creator to her last question posed to the reader, the poet is paying attention to the world at hand. She asks who made the grasshopper, but clarifies this grasshopper. Like any good artist, she’s interested in the particulars of what she finds in front of her.
She says, “I don’t know exactly what a prayer is. / I do know how to pay attention.” In this contrast of prayer and paying attention, might she be suggesting that the two have much to do with each other?
And when she comes to that last striking question, “what is it you plan to do / with your one wild and precious life?", my mind goes into business mode. I think of making plans and resolutions. I assess. But surely, in the context of the poem, this is not what she has in mind. She’s celebrating a decidedly unproductive day and then confronting us: “Tell me, what else should I have done?”
A couple weeks ago in Sojourn Midtown’s “Planted” sermon series, Pastor Nathan preached on Christian meditation, encouraging us to root ourselves in the scriptures this coming year. He encouraged us to pay attention to the Bible and let that attention lead us into prayer. For me, I think I’ll plant myself in Psalm 16 and the Gospel of John. But I also want to plant myself in the particulars of the world in front of me. Like Mary Oliver I want to know “how to be idle and blessed.”
Whether paying attention to a grasshopper or the scriptures, time spent meditating on beauty, truth, and goodness before God is no waste.