Special Day

Today is our wedding anniversary and the birthday of our youngest daughter. This morning after breakfast dd and I read the Bible and then I read her a poem I wrote for BBC (see link at sidebar). This weekend we'd spent some time at Barnes and Noble and she'd bought The Collected Poems of Emily Dickinson with a gift card someone had given her. So after I read her my poem, she asked if I'd ever read the poem about pain by E. D. I didn't remember it, so she got up and ran out of the room saying over her shoulder, "Just a minute. I'll get it and read it to you. I really like it."

What followed was a spontaneous reading and mutual enjoyment of poetry. Very special and one of the moments that make me glad we homeschool.

XIX

Pain has an element of blank;
It cannot recollect
When it began, or if there were
A day when it was not.

It has no future but itself,
Its infinite realms contain
Its past, enlightened to perceive
New periods of pain.

We reflected on how Dickinson capture the totality of pain, how when you're in pain (both physical and emotional) it seems to have existed forever and to be neverending.

Then she asked about another poem she'd read the night before. So we read it together. I don't remember ever reading it before and I love it! (It's longer.)

XXVIII

I bring an unaccustomed wine
To lips long parching, next to mine,
And summon them to drink.

Crackling with fever, they essay;
I turn my brimming eyes away.
And come next hour to look.

The hands still hug the tardy glass;
The lips I would have cooled, alas!
Are so superfluous cold.

I would as soon attempt to warm
The bosoms where the frost has lain
Ages beneath the mould.

Some other thirsty there may be
To whom this would have pointed me
Had it remained to speak.

And so I always bear the cup
If haply, mine may be the drop
Some pilgrim thirst to slake, -

If haply, any say to me,
"Unto the little, unto me,"
When I at last awake.

Seems to me E.D. is saying that she will keep on offering succor to people (water, kindness, spiritual refreshment) even if they don't respond, are "dead." Because some day, when she "awakes," in heaven she will be told that what she did to the least of these, she did for Jesus.

Anyway we had a good time together this a.m., our first day of school in 2008 and I wanted to record a bit of it.

My dh also shared a song with me of a bit different nature (Johnny Cash) that I will hopefully share in another entry!