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?
The Journey
By Mary Oliver
One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and began,
though the voices around you
kept shouting their bad advice-
though the whole house
began to tremble and you felt the old tug
at your ankles.
"Mend my life!" each voice cried.
But you didn't stop.
You knew what you had to do,
though the wind pried
with its stiff fingers
at the very foundations,
though their melancholy
was terrible.
It was already late enough,
and a wild night,
and the road full of fallen
branches and stones.
But little by little,
as you left their voices behind,
the stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice
which you slowly
recognized as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do the only thing you could do-
determined to save
the only life that you could save.
Love after Love
by Derrick Wolcott
The day will come
when with elation
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door
in your own mirror
and each will smile at the other's welcome
Saying sit here, eat.
You will love again
the stranger
who was yourself.
Give wine, give bread,
give back your heart to itself,
to the stranger who has loved you all your life,
whom you ignored for another,
who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the book shelf,
the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror,
Sit,
feast on your life.
