Today is Yom Kippur. It is the Day of Atonement — the heaviest hitter of the Jewish holidays. The day you apologize and the day you remember.

Today, my dear and oft-mentioned friend Deborah posted a poem on her Facebook page.

Today, I was going to post the recipe I used for my (burned) Rosh Hashana challah, but instead I think I’ll post this beautiful poem — in honor of the cherished people lost this past year.

Not just the people I knew.

I didn’t agree with a (politcal) word he wrote, but I teared up this morning when Cokie Roberts mentioned that William Safire had planned to host a Yom Kippur break the fast dinner tonight. As she and others put it, he was a man who disagreed without being disagreeable. A man who chose his words. We could use more of that in this world. 

And I was sad to learn that Lucy Vodden died. She was the namesake for John Lennon’s “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” — a poem of a song.

Speaking of poetry, here is “The Summer Day” by Mary Oliver, with thanks to Deborah.

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?