Too many mental tabs open today.

Friday, February 4, 2011

little hands, big heart



i was saying goodnight to k a few nights ago when she grabbed my hand, she wasn't ready for me to leave yet. she wrapped her little fingers around mine and held on tight. resisting this is useless and she knows it. i stayed with her until she was asleep looking at her hands the whole time. they've grown so from the tiny little things that held my attention for hours when she was a baby. in fact it's getting harder and harder to even remember those moments, i am thankful for the thousands of pictures I have.

seeing her tiny hands for the first time reminded me of an e.e. cummings poem i read when i was a kid. at the time i had no idea what he was writing about, i just thought it was cool that he didn't use correct grammar, punctuation or capital letters. i was an early reader and ripped through anything i could get my hands and eyes on, regardless of the content. i have no idea where the poetry book came from but i remember this poem well. "not even the rain, has such small hands" as a kid i thought for sure that this poem was about a kid, made sense enough at the time. i remember coming back to it later, as an adult, and finding a completely different meaning in it. i was a little bummed, it was so much sweeter when i thought it was about little kid hands.

anyway, i was reminded of this poem recently and wanted to share it with her, i figured i might as well as well share it here. regardless of the meaning you come away with after reading, it remains, to this day, one of my all time favorites:


somewhere i have never travelled
ee cummings

somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond
any experience,your eyes have their silence:
in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
or which i cannot touch because they are too near

your slightest look easily will unclose me
though i have closed myself as fingers,
you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens
(touching skilfully,mysteriously)her first rose

or if your wish be to close me,i and
my life will shut very beautifully,suddenly,
as when the heart of this flower imagines
the snow carefully everywhere descending;

nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals
the power of your intense fragility:whose texture
compels me with the color of its countries,
rendering death and forever with each breathing

(i do not know what it is about you that closes
and opens;only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
nobody,not even the rain,has such small hands

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