Two Summer Poems: Mary Oliver's "The Summer Day" and Lucille Clifton's "testament"

Two poems for summer’s beginning.

First, in anticipation: Oliver’s classic portrait of a summer day, both a challenge to answer the question of what we “plan to do” with the “wild and precious” days before us, and a call to reconsider what counts as a good day in the first place (Oliver makes the case here for a blessed kind of idleness).

And second, in celebration: with Clifton’s birthday coming up (June 27), here’s her “testament,” simultaneously recalling her personal beginning, creation’s cosmic beginning, and the myriad beginnings this time of year, the fresh starts promised by the first days of summer.

Both evoke the idea that the world is a kind of poem to be explored and savored, and thus that God is well-conceived as the Poet of Heaven and Earth — in the beginning, yes, and also every single day, beginning and beginning and beginning again. A world, a sigh, a voice, a light!

“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

+++

“testament”

in the beginning
was the word

the year of our lord,
amen, I
lucille clifton
hereby testify
that in that room
there was a light
and in that light
there was a voice
and in that voice
there was a sigh
and in that sigh
there was a world.
a world a sigh a voice a light and
I alone
in a room

+ Lucille Clifton