(Christmas spoiler alert!)

The Christmas presents I'm making for my immediate family involve poetry, but since I'm pretty sure none of them read this blog (OR DO YOU, SNEAKIES?) I feel safe disclosing the previous detail.

I've been going through my pitifully sparse stash of poetry books, and keep finding ones that are so, so great. I really should be dog-earing all the pages or something, but I'll just leave them alone for another four years or so- enough time to forget them and rediscover them all over again.

Here's one of my new favorites:

i am a little church(no great cathedral)
far from the splendor and squalor of hurrying cities
-i do not worry if briefer days grow briefest,
i am not sorry when sun and rain make april

my life is the life of the reaper and the sower;
my prayers are prayers of earth's own clumsily striving
(finding and losing and laughing and crying)children
whose any sadness or joy is my grief or my gladness

around me surges a miracle of unceasing
birth and glory and death and resurrection:
over my sleeping self float flaming symbols
of hope,and i wake to a perfect patience of mountains

i am a little church(far from the frantic
world with its rapture and anguish)at peace with nature
-i do not worry if longer nights grow longest;
i am not sorry when silence becomes singing

winter by spring,i lift my diminutive spire to
merciful Him Whose only now is forever:
standing erect in the deathless truth of His presence
(welcoming humbly His light and proudly His darkness)

- ee cummings


p.s. Toby can fight with Coconut while laying down, and she has all four paws on his face somehow. He is the gentlest big brother/cousin I've ever seen.