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Mary Oliver reads “The Summer Day”

In celebration of the solstice, we post this video featuring Mary Oliver reading her poem, “The Summer Day” (referred to by many as “The Grasshopper”). The audio is from the CD “At Blackwater Pond: Mary Oliver reads Mary Oliver,” and the pictures are from Welfleet Bay Wildlife Sanctuary on Cape Cod.

Mary Oliver reads “The Summer Day” on YouTube

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?

Copyright @ 1990 by Mary Oliver. First published in House of Light, Beacon Press. Reprinted in The Truro Bear and Other Adventures: Poems and Essays, Beacon Press.