Read more poetry
April is National Poetry Month. What say we read some poetry this month?
I’ll start with a poem, two lines of which are included in my very first post on 37days. I had the pleasure of hearing its author read this aloud to me last Friday evening. There were a few hundred lookers-on, but I swear she turned slightly to her left and looked down at me in the second row when this one was read, nodding her head and smiling at me knowingly as she got to the end. Or perhaps not. I’ll just keep pretending that I am my own Forest Gump, appearing in history.
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 it you plan to do
With your one wild and precious life?
–Mary Oliver
There is just something about hearing a writer read their words aloud that seals them, takes them off the page into a fuller place, acknowledges the hidden nuances of phrasing and emphasis and meaning, both to the writer – and to the listener.
