Happiness is Getting the Brain Cells Back Together Plus Spring

I am feeling MUCH better, back to work (happily), big new plans, and in the middle of all of that the NYT did this thing on memorizing poems and made me think about the poems I’ve memorized from just reading them so often. Theodore Roethke’s “I Knew A Woman”: “I measure time by how a body sways.” Elinor Wylie’s “Now Let No Charitable Hope” with its evaluation of the years of her life: “But none has merited my fear/And none has quite escaped my smile.” Stevie Smith’s “Not Waving but Drowning.” Christina Rosetti’s “Goblin Market.” Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s sonnets. So many. And then there’s the poem that comes back to me at 2AM when I’m walking Johnny in the balmy night of spring, or just having left Pat after a great day of food and thrifting, or stretching out at night after a good, good day with a sleeping puppy beside me: e.e.cummings, always right there:

e.e. cummings: i thank You God

i thank You God for most this amazing
day: for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
and a blue true dream of sky; and for everything
which is natural which is infinite which is yes
(i who have died am alive again today,
and this is the sun’s birthday; this is the birth
day of life and of love and wings: and of the gay
great happening illimitably earth)
how should tasting touching hearing seeing
breathing any—lifted from the no
of all nothing—human merely being
doubt unimaginable You?
(now the ears of my ears awake and
now the eyes of my eyes are opened)

I may not be able to recite the whole thing without a mistake, but that first line, thanking the world for an amazing day, that’s going to stay with me forever. Poetry saves.

What made you amazingly happy this week?