Who made the world? Who made the swan, and the black b… Who made the grasshopper? This grasshopper, I mean– the one who has flung herself out…

The river Of my childhood, That tumbled Down a passage of rocks And cut-work ferns,

The first fish I ever caught would not lie down quiet in the pail but flailed and sucked

The feet of the heron, under those bamboo stems, hold the blue body, the great beak above the shallows

You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your kn… for a hundred miles through the de… You only have to let the soft anim… love what it loves.

Did you too see it, drifting, all… Did you see it in the morning, ris… An armful of white blossoms, A perfect commotion of silk and li… into the bondage of its wings; a s…

Have you ever seen anything in your life more wonderful than the way the sun,

Not quite four a.m., when the rapt… strikes me from sleep, and I rise from the comfortable bed and go to another room, where my books ar… in their neat and colorful rows. H…

Today again I am hardly myself. It happens over and over. It is heaven-sent. It flows through me like the blue wave.

Hello, sun in my face. Hello, you who make the morning and spread it over the fields and into the faces of the tulips and the nodding morning glories,

From a single grain they have mult… When you look in the eyes of one you have seen them all. At the edges of highways they pick at limp things.

Understand, I am always trying to… what the soul is, and where hidden, and what shape and so, last week,

My work is loving the world. Here the sunflowers, there the hum… equal seekers of sweetness. Here the quickening yeast; there t… Here the clam deep in the speckled…

In the early curtains of the dusk it flew, a slow galloping this way and that way

“For example, what the trees do not only in lightning storms or the watery dark of a summer’s n… or under the white nets of winter but now, and now, and now—whenever