Don't Love Your Life Too Much

Continuing our National Poetry Monthly selections, an excerpt from Mary Oliver, one of our finest poets and one of the few who can actually sell out a reading:

For years and years I struggled
just to love my life. And then

the butterfly
rose, weightless in the wind.
"Don't love your life
too much," it said,

and vanished
into the world.
from "One or Two Things"

And something new from me:

Lightning in a Bottle

Dozens of interlaced
nerves branch out
like ant pathways
in all directions
crackling like a hundred
tiny electrical fires if
I could find the switch
I could sleep.

To Pay Attention

For today's offering, something contemporary. Mary Oliver is one of America's finest contemporary poets, combining a keen set of senses attuned to the natural world with a remarkable gift for language. This poem is from her 1992 Collection, New and Selected Poems.

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?

Happy Easter!