I Thank You God

Lent is over - but still a week of poems on "never turning away again"... Today's is an exuberant sonnet by E E Cummings:

i thank You God for this most 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)

Picnic by Mora's river - the Ribeira da Raia. Manuel joined us later, with his dog, the wine, and an Easter cake which has two hard-boiled eggs in their shells decorating it. Even though they'd insisted it was only a very simple affair, we expected what Barry Hatton says in his book, The Portuguese: "this being Portugal, it does not involve a sandwich and paper cups on a car rug..."