E.E. Cummings

I often think of E.E. Cummings on Thanksgiving, a poet who wrote much about natural miracles and our need to appreciate them. Here's one of the better known poems:

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 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 ~

Cummings is the first poet I became excited about after returning to school after the Army. A teacher at Pasadena Community College, J. Robert Trevor, who also would be the first to encourage me to explore writing as a profession, started each of his English classes by reading a poem; since he was a big Cummings fan, we heard a lot of his work. My attraction to Cummings has continued through life.

Here is Wonderful One Times One, my dramatic appreciation of Cummings.

Wikipedia bio of E.E. Cummings.