A Saturday Morning Poem
Readers of this blog know that I love poetry and often write about it or weave poems into my posts. But the idea of posting a weekly poem is one I stole from a friend of mine (thanks, Gaylene) who offers Poetry Tuesday as a regular feature of her blog. Wish I'd thought of that, but there's plenty of poetry around for the sharing...and it happens to be Saturday morning.
Saturday morning. Isn't there something inherently poetic about that? So I am hereby launching a brand new feature: A Saturday Morning Poem. (Glad you happened to stop by!) As my inaugural selection, here is one of my old favorites (in honor of Monte and Miranda), because tomorrow is Valentine's Day, and this poem is about the magic of love and the wonder of being alive:
GREAT THINGS HAVE HAPPENED by Alden Nowlan
We were talking about the great things
that have happened in our lifetimes;
and I said, “Oh, I suppose the moon landing
was the greatest thing that has happened
in my time.” But, of course, we were all lying.
The truth is the moon landing didn’t mean
one-tenth as much to me as one night in 1963
when we lived in a three-room flat in what once had been
the mansion of some Victorian merchant prince
(our kitchen had been a clothes closet, I’m sure),
on a street where by now nobody lived
who could afford to live anywhere else.
That night, the three of us, Claudine, Johnnie and me,
woke up at half-past four in the morning
and ate cinnamon toast together.
“Is that all?” I hear somebody ask.
Oh, but we were silly with sleepiness
and, under our windows, the street-cleaners
were working their machines and conversing in Italian, and
everything was strange without being threatening,
even the tea-kettle whistled differently
than in the daytime: it was like the feeling
you get sometimes in a country you’ve never visited
before, when the bread doesn’t taste quite the same,
the butter is a small adventure, and they put
paprika on the table instead of pepper,
except that there was nobody in this county
except the three of us, half-tipsy with the wonder
of being alive, and wholly enveloped in love.