On a recent summer day in front of the Tattered Cover Bookstore in Denver, I met this street poet. Give him a topic and he will write you a personalized poem on his traveling typewriter. For five years, he’s traveled the country creating this beautiful blend of speech and song we call poetry.

I discovered the poems of Mary Oliver shortly after she died this year in January. Critics call her poems too accessible, and this is the very reason I love them. Taking her themes from the natural beauty of our world, she simplifies topics such as prayer, clutter, worrying, living mindfully, and dying with grace. 

 “The Summer Day “is a good introduction to the many words of wisdom by this poet. Take a moment to “be idle and blessed” while you savor her moment with a grasshopper.

 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?