little learner

Favourite Poems

who are you,little i

by   e. e. cummings

who are you,little i

(five or six years old)
peering from some high

window;at the gold
of november sunset

(and feeling: that if day
has to become night

this is a beautiful way)

 

Word

by Madeleine L’Engle

I, who live by words, am wordless when
I try my words in prayer. All language turns
To silence. Prayer will take my words and then
Reveal their emptiness. The stilled voice learns
To hold its peace, to listen with the heart
To silence that is joy, is adoration.
The self is shattered, all words torn apart
In this strange patterned time of contemplation
That, in time, breaks time, breaks words, breaks me,
And then, in silence, leaves me healed and mended.
I leave, returned to language, for I see
Through words, even when all words are ended.

I, who live by words, am wordless when
I turn me to the Word to pray. Amen.

January

by William Carlos Williams

Again I reply to the triple winds

running chromatic fifths of derision

outside my window:

Play louder.

You will not succeed. I am

bound more to my sentences

the more you batter at me

to follow you.

And the wind,

as before, fingers perfectly

its derisive music.

 

The Answer

by Carl Sandburg

You have spoken the answer.

A child searches far sometimes

Into the red dust

On a dark rose leaf

And so you have gone far

For the answer is:

Silence.

In the republic

Of the winking stars

and spent cataclysms

Sure we are it is off there the answer is hidden and folded over,

Sleeping in the sun, careless whether it is Sunday or any other day

of the week,

Knowing silence will bring all one way or another.

 

Have we not seen

Purple of the pansy

out of the mulch

and mold

crawl

into a dusk

of velvet?

blur of yellow?

Almost we thought from nowhere but it was the silence,

the future,

working.

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 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)

 

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A Small Discovery

by James Emanuel

Father,
Where do giants go to cry?

To the hills
Behind the thunder?
Or to the waterfall?
I wonder.

(Giants cry.
I know they do.
Do they wait
Till nighttime too?)

 

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What a beautiful poem.  It has enormous force and touches the heart, as do most questions that are posed by wide-eyed children.  It is so simple and yet so profound, so small and so powerful.  

 

Late Summer

by C.S. Lewis

I, dusty and bedraggled as I am,
Pestered with wasps and weed and making jam,
Blowzy and stale, my welcome long outstayed,
Proved false in every promise that I made,
At my beginning I believed, like you,
Something would come of all my green and blue.
Mortals remember, looking on the thing
I am, that I, even I, was once a spring.

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I love this poem.  
This I constantly remind myself:
“Remember, as you gaze on the thing I am,
that I, even I, was once a spring.”