The eyes of my eyes are opened

College kids are home. School is almost out. The sky is a bright, deep blue. Some of us have been digging in the dirt, working on our gardens. Some of us have been out on the golf course. Some of us have been walking on the beach. Some of us have been mowing the lawn. Some of us have been driving with the top down. Some of us have been walking our dogs around the lake. Some of us have been sitting in the sunshine feeling grateful to be alive.

As I sit in my yard marveling at the fresh green of the leaves against that impossibly blue sky, my mind drifts to one of the very first poems I ever loved. My parents had a volume of e. e. cummings when I was a child, and I used to flip through it, in awe of his crisp language - and his defiantly chaotic use of capitals and punctuation! This is the poem that I think of on these spring days:

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)