We write because we must. Poetry is born of sorrow and joy, love and loss, triumph and disaster. It is inspired by sunset and sunrise, by spring flowers and winter snow, and it comes to us, almost painfully, seeking a way out, a way forward, a way towards and we wrestle with words, with images, with rhyme and intense feelings until suddenly, there it is, on the page, the poem – our poem, eager to be read, anxious to be felt.
Poem of the Month
THE SUMMER DAY
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?