1. Read the poem 

  2. Do your own reflection on it, noting what it inspires in you

  3. Feel free to use your own reflection as your prompt or…

  4. Use the selection of prompts in the column on the right

  5. Pick one that inspires you and write (feel free to use only one or write several poems using different prompts) or…

  6. Don’t use any of the provided prompts and follow your inspiration from wherever it comes

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 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?

Mary Oliver
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rBPHUE961zI

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Next Read-Around is:
Thursday, February 23, 2023 at 5:00 PM PST

My Thoughts

As winter takes it slow easy time warming towards spring, it’s natural to cast our gaze from the sheltered heart of our troubles onto the picnic days of summer. No matter the magnitude, from tiny daily irritants to a world in perpetual crises, we need a break from time to time to find our footing in life again. Nothing is more iconic of that free spirit than a summer day. Ahhh, to be in the world as we once were without a time limit and absent a lists of to-do’s; to be so engaged with life, we go without need of plan or purpose.

Mary Oliver’s poem, The Summer Day, catches the essence of those gifted days when abstractions lose their luster: when something in us kneels down to life and we come home to our senses. We find fascination in the veins of leaves and the swirl morning coffee, in the grace of gliding swans and the gathered laughter at a table. Though summer may lend an lingering aura to our day, urging us to be idle, Oliver points our that the secret to the halcyon heart is in how we pay attention, which we can bring to any day in any season of our life. Call it a “summer state of mind:” that willingness to kneel down, to look closely, as Oliver did at the grasshopper, with a purity of attention equivalent to prayer. Who knows what it may then teach you abour living your one wild and precious life.

Prompt Menu

  1. Journal or write a poem about a memorable summer day from your life.

  2. Pick an insect that you have either observed carefully and can describe or search on you tube for a video of an insect. Journal or write about a few peculiraties of its behavior and movement and end with a question about life that it leads you to ponder.

  3. In your opinion, what exactly is a prayer? Do you pray? If so, how? If not, why not? Or consider writing a recipe for prayer; or a list poem of things you pray for or about.

  4. Use the format of cotrasting an abstract thing with concrete actions: I don’t know exactly what X is. I do know how to…

  5. How do you spend your idle idle time? Journal or write a poem about what you do in your idle time and how you do it.

  6. Do you have a plan for your life? Journal or write a poem about your plan, or about the lack of a plan. How do you keep it on track and what do you do when it is off track?

  7. Journal or write a poem about your “one wild and precious life.” What makes it wild? What makes it precious?

  8. As usual, write about anything else that inspires you from the poem or from life.