Do you remember hearing a cricket chirping at night? Did you enjoy listening to its song, or was it annoying? Two well-known poets wrote about their encounters with a cricket, but from different points of view—the poet and the cricket.
I first found this poem, Nothing Is Too Small Not to Be Wondered About, by Mary Oliver. Attentive to all creatures, including the smallest of them, she wonders what happened to the cricket after it stopped its singing.
I then came across another poem about a cricket, Postlude, by Rita Dove. But it’s written from the perspective of one with something to say, and the magic that can happen when we stop and listen.
1st cricket poem
Nothing Is Too Small Not to Be Wondered About Mary Oliver
The cricket doesn’t wonder
if there’s a heaven
or, if there is, if there’s room for him.
It’s fall. Romance is over. Still, he sings.
If he can, he enters a house
through the tiniest crack under the door.
Then the house grows colder.
He sings slower and slower.
Then, nothing.
This must mean something, I don’t know what.
But certainly it doesn’t mean
he hasn’t been an excellent cricket
all his life.
Mary Oliver, “Nothing Is Too Small Not to Be Wondered About.” Felicity: Poems. New York: Penguin Press, 2016.
I found that one on Best Poems, and then as it appears with line breaks on page 27 of Felicity posted at the University of Arizona Poetry Center under Poems of Love and Compassion.
2nd cricket poem
Postlude Rita Dove Stay by the hearth, little cricket. —Cendrillon You prefer me invisible, no more than a crisp salute far away from your silks and firewood and woolens. Out of sight, I'm merely an annoyance, one slim, obstinate wrinkle in night's deepening trance. When sleep fails, you wish me shushed and back in my hole. As usual, you're not listening: time stops only if you stop long enough to hear it passing. This is my business: I've got ten weeks left to croon through. What you hear is a lifetime of song.
“Postlude” by Rita Dove, featured in The Paris Review Issue No. 235, Winter 2020. Copyright © 2020 by The Paris Review, used by permission of The Wylie Agency LLC.
Read Rita Dove’s impressive biography after the poem in Featured Poet published on Poetry Daily, a partnership between the Daily Poetry Association and George Mason University.
Read about Mary Oliver (1935-2019) and her astonishing poetry in this memorial acknowledgment to her poetic legacy. It contains links to articles, interviews, and poetry readings, as well as many of her favorite poems I’ve loved and posted over the years.
— Written and compiled by Ken Chawkin for The Uncarved Blog.
The Uncarved Blog 
