Mary Oliver - The Summer Day

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 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 is you plan to do
With your one wild and precious life?


This wonderful poem by Mary Oliver reminds me of the work of
Walt Whitman. We are very proud of Mary Oliver, a native of Maple Heights --a
Clevelander. She is one of America's national treasures.

A Great Poem by Clevelander Mary Oliver

When Death Comes

by Mary Oliver

From "New and Selected Poems" by Mary Oliver (Beacon Press, 25 Beacon St, Boston, MA 02108-2892, ISBN 0 870 6819 5).

When death comes
like the hungry bear in autumn;
when death comes and takes all the bright coins from his purse

to buy me, and snaps the purse shut;
when death comes
like the measles-pox;

when death comes
like an iceberg between the shoulder blades,

I want to step through the door full of curiosity, wondering:
what is it going to be like, that cottage of darkness?

And therefore I look upon everything
as a brotherhood and a sisterhood,
and I look upon time as no more than an idea,
and I consider eternity as another possibility,

and I think of each life as a flower, as common
as a field daisy, and as singular,

and each name a comfortable music in the mouth
tending as all music does, toward silence,

and each body a lion of courage, and something
precious to the earth.

When it's over, I want to say: all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.

When it is over, I don't want to wonder
if I have made of my life something particular, and real.
I don't want to find myself sighing and frightened,
or full of argument.

I don't want to end up simply having visited this world. #

Mary Oliver is from Maple Heights, a southwest suburb of Cleveland. And we are very proud of her, one of America's greatest poets. What can be added to this poem? She says it all. I love her lines "and each body a lion of courage and something / precious to the earth." We humans are the only creations of God called on to be courageous--and in so many cases we are!

"So Early in the Spring"--Homage to Skunk Cabbage

[See an image of skunk cabbage at this address:

http://frankwinters.wordpress.com/2007/01/25/waxing-crescent-moon-owl-and-skunk-cabbage/]

Anyone who sings the praises of Skunk Cabbage must be crazy, right? But hold on a second. The harbinger of earliest spring in Northern Ohio is a lot like us--a survivor of terrible winters, something deep-rooted in the area, shaped by the Lake Effect, and overall a tough hombre! And, yea, like us doesn't always smell too good. One of America's greatest poets, Mary Oliver, grew up in Maple Heights, just southeast of Cleveland. Mary Oliver has written many wonderful poems over the years ("Wild Geese"--one of the greatest), and below is her homage to Skunk Cabbage:

Skunk Cabbage

And now as the iron rinds over

the ponds start dissolving,

you come, dreaming of ferns and flowers

and new leaves unfolding,

upon the brash

turnip-hearted skunk cabbage

slinging its bunches of leaves up

through the chilling mud.

You kneel beside it. The smell

is lurid and flows out in the most

unabashed way, attracting

into itself a continual spattering

of protein. Appalling its rough

green caves, and the thought

of the thick root nested below, stubborn

and powerful as instinct!

But these are the woods you love,

where the secret name

of every death is life again - a miracle

wrought surely not of mere turning

but of dense and scalding reenactment. Not

tenderness, not longing, but daring and brawn

pull down the frozen waterfall, the past.

Ferns, leaves, flowers, the last subtle

refinements, elegant and easeful, wait

to rise and flourish.

What blazes the trail is not necessarily pretty.

Mary Oliver