Who made the grasshopper?

The Summer Day (by Mary Oliver)

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?

from New and Selected Poems, 1992
Beacon Press, Boston, MA

Copyright 1992 by Mary Oliver.

Insectology at Oxbow, Part 2: "GlassHoppers"

A nice thing about having an insect course at an art school in the woods in the fact that a master glass artist might be leading a class in the next building. You might get talking to him, his name might be Jeff Mack, and next thing you know he is interested in making an insect out of glass the next morning from whatever your students might have collected/dissected.

It just so happened Lauren and Liz had a nice grasshopper sitting around and another set out in "parts" that could quite serendipitously function as a visual guide to making an insect modularly:

Jeff worked fast on this first attempt at an arthropod - studying and sketching, and then working the glass for about 3 hours ~

 

The final metamorphosis of it as a remarkable glasshopper as none of us had seen before - equal parts mindblowing and lovely. 

 

Still, nothing beats witnessing a grasshopper making itself in the flesh, as this one was doing, molting an old skin for a new one right before our eyes ~

AY