"When Death Comes" and "The Summer Day" by Mary Oliver

I've encountered Mary Oliver poems now and then throughout the years. Now I've bought several books that are collections of her creations. 

Most days I read a couple of poems before I meditate. I'm not much of a poetry admirer, but Oliver speaks to me with her love of nature, honesty, and general sense of spiritual-but-not-religious. 

Here's two poems that I particularly like in her "New and Selected Poems, Volume 1."

When Death Comes

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 measle-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's 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.

----------------------------

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?

Comments

[777]

I don't want to find myself sighing and frightened,
or full of argument.

You will be where your heart already is.

Like having lost a Lover deliberately

777

[Roger]

"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—......"

---I just love this poem....
the back and forth could represent the non-conceptual, and the up and down the conceptual.

[Sandra]

Yes, Brian, very inspiring poems.
I am saying this to myself:
Please go through your life with open eyes
Instead of closing them in meditation
in search for a ...don’t know ...God, maybe.
You won’t find anything in the darkness except your own brain-produced thoughts and pictures.
Look around and you will be aware of what you are searching for.
So please – enjoy life as long as possible
‘cause once – too soon – you will keep your eyes closed anyway –
forever.

[Roger]

Sandra,

Nicely said.

[Sandra]

Thank you, Roger :-D