Your Voice
For the world around you,
You have a choice . . .
To change your circumstances,
And find your voice!
© Forrest W. Heaton, January 2019
Born on my Dad’s birthday, 10 September, albeit thirty years later, in 1935, Mary Oliver suffered a difficult childhood, was sexually abused, became more comfortable in the natural world than in the social world, started writing poetry at the age of fourteen, and found writing helped her create a world in which she could excel. She went on to be honored with the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1984 for American Primitive, her fifth collection, and the National Book Award for her New and Selected Poems in 1992. Mary died nine days ago, 17January, at the age of 83. We will miss her wisdom, her focus, her inspiration, her ability to choose and order words like almost no other. At the same time, we celebrate her life, her work, her inspiration, and what became for many her “life-saving” poetry—“life-saving” because many, despairing, found inspiration from her poems to rise above their despair to find new affirmation, new purpose, new direction.
In this short post to acknowledge our celebration of Mary Oliver’s life, we’ve chosen just one of her widely-quoted poems as an example of her wisdom, her ability to inspire—The Summer Day. We encourage you to seek out other of her poems and collections.
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?
—Mary Oliver
