Today’s poem is brought to us by Mrs Street, Teacher of English

Today’s poem is by the twentieth century American poet, e.e. cummings. When he was still a child, he decided to become a poet; between the ages of eight and twenty-two he wrote a poem a day, exploring many traditional poetic forms. By the time he was at Harvard in 1916 he had begun writing avant-garde poems. Rules dictating grammar and syntax were disregarded as cummings experimented dynamically with form and language.

I read this aloud at my uncle’s funeral twenty years ago. An odd choice?  Maybe. I can’t remember what exactly called me to choose this poem, but I do remember the light pouring in through the windows as I read.  It was an amazingly sunny day. My uncle died young, in his forties – he was my favourite uncle. I remember feeling how alive I felt that day, in the presence of grief and questions and confusion. And I remember how my brother gripped my hand after the reading in a way he had never done before.

Poems carry us sometimes, providing the words we need but perhaps cannot find within ourselves. And then memories inhabit them. Is there a poem that makes you remember feeling alive to an experience or an emotion? Might it speak to you today if you reconjured it for yourself?

i thank you God for most this amazing
by e.e. cummings

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)