Gratitude: June 27, 2023: I Do Everything I Am Told

 

Gratitude: June 18, 2023

Sports

I’ve seen my fair share of baseball games,
eaten smothered hotdogs in Kansas City
and carne asada burritos in San Francisco
in the sunny stands on a day free of fog.
I’ve sat in a bar for hours watching
basketball and baseball and the Super Bowl,
and I’ve even high-fived and clinked
my almost-empty drink with a stranger
because it felt good to go through something
together even though we hadn’t been through
anything but the drama of a game, its players.
If I am honest, what I love, why I love
the sounds of the games even when I’m not
interested, half-listening, is one thing:
When my father and my stepfather had to be
in the same room, or had to drop my brother
and me off during our weekly move from one
house to another, they, for a brief moment,
would stand together in the doorway or
on the gravel driveway and it felt like what true
terror should feel like, two men who were so
different you could barely see their shadows
attached in the same way, and just when
I thought I couldn’t watch the pause
lengthen between them, they’d talk about
the playoffs or the finals or whatever team
was doing whatever thing required that season
and sometimes they’d even shrug or make
a motion that felt like two people who weren’t
opposites after all. Once, I sat in the car
and waited for one of them to take me away
and from the backseat I swear they looked
like they were on the same team, united
against a common enemy, had been fighting,
all this time, on the same side. 

Ada Limon

Gratitude: June 16, 2023

1. Coping

The Orange

At lunchtime I bought a huge orange—
The size of it made us all laugh.
I peeled it and shared it with Robert and Dave—
They got quarters and I had a half.

And that orange, it made me so happy,
As ordinary things often do
Just lately. The shopping. A walk in the park.
This is peace and contentment. It’s new.

The rest of the day was quite easy.
I did all the jobs on my list
And enjoyed them and had some time over.
I love you. I’m glad I exist.

Wendy Cope 

2. a decade of Anticipation. 

 

A Dark Thing Inside The Day

So many want to be lifted by song and dancing,
and this morning it is easy to understand.
I write in the sound of chirping birds hidden
in the almond trees, the almonds still green
and thriving in the foliage. Up the street,
a man is hammering to make a new house as doves
continue their cooing forever. Bees humming
and high above that a brilliant clear sky.
The roses are blooming and I smell the sweetness.
Everything desirable is here already in abundance.
And the sea. The dark thing is hardly visible
in the leaves, under the sheen. We sleep easily.
So I bring no sad stories to warn the heart.
All the flowers are adult this year. The good
world gives and the white doves praise all of it.

Linda Gregg

 A Work of Artifice

The bonsai tree
in the attractive pot
could have grown eighty feet tall
on the side of a mountain
till split by lightning.
But a gardener
carefully pruned it.
It is nine inches high.
Every day as he
whittles back the branches
the gardener croons,
It is your nature
to be small and cozy,
domestic and weak;
how lucky, little tree,
to have a pot to grow in.
With living creatures
one must begin very early
to dwarf their growth:
the bound feet,
the crippled brain,
the hair in curlers,
the hands you
love to touch.

Marge Piercy

Peter Gabriel - Don't Give Up (ft. Kate Bush)

"You can’t get enough of a thing you don’t need."

🙏

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) 

e.e. cummings