Tuesday, June 2, 2009

To Say Nothing But Thank You



On a gray morning, having just uncovered the newly planted flowers that I had to cover yet again because of frost, my favorite literary magazine, The Sun, offered this lovely bit of light.





To Say Nothing But Thank You

by Jeanne Lohmann


All day I try to say nothing but thank you,

breathe the syllables in and out with every step I

take through the rooms of my house and outside into

a profusion of shaggy-headed dandelions in the garden

where the tulips' black stamens shake in their crimson cups.

I am saying thank you, yes, to this burgeoning spring

and to the cold wind of its changes. Gratitude comes easy

after a hot shower, when my loosened muscles work,

when eyes and mind begin to clear and even unruly
hair combs into place.


Dialogue with the invisible can go on every minute,

and with surprising gaiety I am saying thank you as I

remember who I am, a woman learning to praise

something as small as dandelion petals floating on the
streaming surface of the bowl of vegetable soup,

my happy, savoring tongue.


-- published in the May 2009 issue of The Sun


This poem requires no commentary, yet its words speak such wisdom to my heart: All the things I've been "trying to" learn about living in awareness, the gratitude it triggers, and the wondrous fact that we need go nowhere save within this moment to commune with God. Perhaps my favorite line of all is "with surprising gaiety I am saying thank you as I remember who I am."

About Me

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Beryl is the author of The Scent of God: A Memoir published by Counterpoint NY in 2006 and A View of the Lake published by Lake Superior Port Cities Inc. in 2001. She’s been living on Lake Superior for seventeen wonderful years, and spent 10 years writing two popular columns for the Cook County News Herald: Newcomer Notes and Putting Down Roots. Beryl is past president of the Schroeder Area Historical Society and a long-time chair of its Oral History and Marketing committees. She is a past board member of the Violence Prevention Center in Grand Marais and committee member for the Grand Marais Art Colony’s first ever annual North Shore Reader and Writers Festival. She’s been published in the Sun Magazine, Minnesota Monthly, Lake Superior Magazine, and The Trenton Times and in the anthologies, Surviving Ophelia published by Perseus Publications in 2001 and The New Writer's Handbook, Vol. 2, published by Scarletta Press in 2008 and was named Best of Minnesota Writers by the Minneapolis Star Tribune. She is currently working on her third memoir: the sequel to The Scent of God.