The Summer Day by Mary Oliver
Read by Jude Williams
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?
Adrift by Mark Nepo
Read by Steven Miller
Everything is beautiful and I am so sad.
This is how the heart makes a duet of
wonder and grief. The light spraying
through the lace of the fern is as delicate as the fibres of memory forming their web around the knot in my throat. The breeze makes the birds move from branch to branch as this ache makes me look for those I’ve lost in the next room, in the next song, in the laugh of the next stranger. In the very centre, under it all, what we have that no one can take away and all that we’ve lost face each other. It is there that I’m adrift, feeling punctured by a holiness that exists inside everything.
I am so sad and everything is beautiful.
Ferns and Acer by Q Tajudin
For Kate
Written and read by Louise Phin
When we first met, you didn’t say a word
You pulled up a chair and put your head on my shoulder
I felt then I would always know you
You were all I hope family to be
Soft, familiar and compass like
Your solid hand, palm to palm
Would pull me in for a hug
Hands that worked hard
Full of your love for the Earth
You appeared to me as though in constant movement
The spinning of a basketball
The tapping of an imaginary drum
Rolling something, dust perhaps, between your fingers
At gatherings you would give your time Singing, clowning and studiously sharing a newly acquired fact
What a relief to know our kids would have your energy in their world
And now, I still feel that they do and that they will
Spinning, singing and learning
Hands, deep in life.