Monday's (unconscious) Mutterings #284

After a wonderfully long weekend of fun, the Fourth, frolic, Wall-E and a trip to urgent care for a sinus infection (why the heck not!!) here's what's left to mutter:

1. Notification :: taxes due
2. Cheat :: Black Jack
3. Top Ten :: Casey Casum
4. Draft :: dodger
5. Unbelievable :: creation
6. Cheap :: dollar store
7. Spontaneous :: poetry
8. Harass :: hassle
9. Lipstick :: Revlon 1950 Cherries in the Snow
10. Transpire :: novel

Thanks to LunaNiña for this bit of mind jogging.

Here, the beginnings of my 'slab garden'--most are in the early stages of loveliness due to our extended winter season this year. But now our weather is in the 90's and our mosquitoes are hungry.

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?

The Summer Day
Mary Oliver
from New and Selected Poems, 1992