Joy in the Simple – elizabeth w. marshall

Of Note To Me And Perhaps One Other Soul

I am lost in the memory of some marvelous moments.

They settled in my treasuring place

Where captured thoughts are trapped

And I can pull them out with remarkable remembering

If I am fortunate to remember them

Even dimly, even faintly

They were these

A daughter singing hymns in my ear so sweet, on the back pew of the church

And a wiggling soul dressed in smocked white dress, with the restlessness of two or less

And they included this

The sound of one whose soul’s been sad sound happy at long last

And hear her speak of hope and sigh relief of all the what’s to come

So I will lose myself in thoughts of what was artful, beautiful in this day

And in the writing and remembering I suddenly can see

The more I see, the more I look, the more I write

Of life as art

And the beautiful in life

With eyes wide open on the heels of January arctic cold

Both losing and finding as Merton wrote

The day she handed a book of poetry to me

On the back row of the church

All this of note to me

And now perhaps one other soul

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