“The Summer Day” is one of Mary Oliver’s most recognizable poems, especially the end:
“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?”
(Read the full poem on poets.org or better yet, spring for a book of her poetry. She published more than 30 collections of poems and essays.)
What do you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?
It’s such a great question and one we can keep asking. Every day, every moment is a chance to recognize the brief length of our existence and to begin again. I think she would have loved the very modern advice to “touch grass.”
There’s a new Mary Oliver documentary airing on PBS starting August 25 by filmmaker Sasha Waters: Mary Oliver: Saved by the Beauty of the World | American Masters | PBS
