{"id":1467,"date":"2015-09-04T00:00:59","date_gmt":"2015-09-04T04:00:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sites.udmercy.edu\/mission-and-identity\/?p=1467"},"modified":"2019-09-18T16:49:19","modified_gmt":"2019-09-18T20:49:19","slug":"sept-4-another-love-song-e-e-cummings","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sites.udmercy.edu\/poetry\/2015\/09\/04\/sept-4-another-love-song-e-e-cummings\/","title":{"rendered":"Sept 4 – Another love song — e e cummings"},"content":{"rendered":"

Friday September 4\u00a0 \u2014 \u00a0“. . . the voice of your eyes . . . “<\/strong><\/p>\n

e e cummings would have objected to my world view on just about every count, as I would his. \u00a0Which demonstrates to me that \u00a0 great poetry connects people through its sheer ability to bring some place in the human condition to life. \u00a0Here\u2019s my all time favorite love poem, posted here before on March 17, 2014.<\/p>\n

I notice that my context note that March morning could have been written today, at the end of the swirl and hammer of early semester work week here in September of 2015.<\/p>\n

“I don’t know why e e cummings love poem caught my attention over the weekend; \u00a0perhaps because I ended last week worn out and have been loving time to sleep in, \u00a0work out, \u00a0take another nap, get some shopping done, after a week of slamming work. But it really doesn’t matter why. \u00a0“Somewhere” is always worth another reading.<\/p>\n

Try it out loud and leave some time when you’ve finished for stillness and breathing.<\/p>\n

Have a good work week.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

john sj<\/p>\n

Somewhere<\/strong><\/p>\n

Somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond
\nany experience, your eyes have their silence:
\nin your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
\nor which i cannot touch because they are too near<\/p>\n

your slightest look easily will unclose me
\nthough i have closed myself as fingers,
\nyou open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens
\n(touching skilfully, mysteriously) her first rose<\/p>\n

or if your wish be to close me, i and
\nmy life will shut very beautifully, suddenly,
\nas when the heart of this flower imagines
\nthe snow carefully everywhere descending;<\/p>\n

nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals
\nthe power of your intense fragility: whose texture
\ncompels me with the color of its countries,
\nrendering death and forever with each breathing<\/p>\n

(i do not know what it is about you that closes
\nand opens; only something in me understands
\nthe voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
\nnobody, not even the rain, has such small hands<\/p>\n

e e cummings<\/p>\n

\"eecummings\"<\/a><\/p>\n

e e cummings 1953<\/p>\n

https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/E._E._Cummings<\/a><\/p>\n

p.s.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 A reader of\u00a0Wednesday\u2019s poem wrote this story from last \u00a0Sunday.<\/p>\n

Sunday, long line at CVS and a woman got in line behind me. Her clothes were shabby; she had two black eyes and a banged up face. She looked angry \u2013 perhaps in pain. I don\u2019t know if she fell off her bike or her paramour had beat her up. I offered her my place in line \u2013said I forgot something that I wanted elsewhere in the store.\u00a0 She responded rather sharply. \u201cYou don\u2019t need to do nuthin for me!\u201d\u00a0 Me: \u201cOK, I\u2019ll leave the cart here, but if you feel like you want to go around it, no problem .\u201d\u00a0 I walked to the freezer to get my Skinny Cow ice cream bars\u2026brought them back, the line hadn\u2019t moved, and she was still there.\u00a0 She looked at the box and mumbled, \u201cWhat are those?\u201d and I told her how chocolaty and sweet they were for 100 calories but it didn\u2019t matter because I\u2019d probably consume 300 of the calories before day\u2019s end. And she snickered a little and started talking \u2013 girl talk \u2013 and we chatted about our useless coupons, and where the best deals are on makeup, and how much our pills cost us, and rolled our eyes and looked at each other when a couple people had only a 4 cent co-pay and we knew ours were going to be higher.\u00a0 We parted smiling like long-time buddies.<\/p>\n

My point is that the poem you posted reminded me of the constant presence of the Holy Spirit always in us, silently walking in us, bringing us to love and life\u2026In a visible way the Holy Spirit filled that bedraggled lady and brought her to delight in life if only for a few \u00a0minutes with \u201cgirl talk.\u201d \u00a0OK, we were chatty, unlike the poem\u2019s message, but the unspoken shouted \u201cYou are not alone. You have value. You have dignity. You are loved.\u201d My prayer is that the Spirit continues to manifest itself within her.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Friday September 4\u00a0 \u2014 \u00a0“. . . the voice of your eyes . . . “ e e cummings would have objected to my world view on just about every count, as I would his. \u00a0Which demonstrates to me that … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":139,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[11641],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.udmercy.edu\/poetry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1467"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.udmercy.edu\/poetry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.udmercy.edu\/poetry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.udmercy.edu\/poetry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/139"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.udmercy.edu\/poetry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1467"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/sites.udmercy.edu\/poetry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1467\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1470,"href":"https:\/\/sites.udmercy.edu\/poetry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1467\/revisions\/1470"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.udmercy.edu\/poetry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1467"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.udmercy.edu\/poetry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1467"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.udmercy.edu\/poetry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1467"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}