i thank You God for most this amazing

i thank You God for most this amazingday: for the leaping greenly spirits of treesand a blue true dream of sky; and for everythingwhich 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)

e.e. cummings

A Strange Goodbye
(rough draft)

Breath and bones, a tangle of sharp words, but you were really essence of water.
You, rising up with the sun, filled with light.
I couldn't see you that way when you were alive.
Was it always in you waiting to be revealed?

I didn't know you were the sea. I thought you were a man, stuck on this plane.
Just like me, a mass of opinions. We believed in things together.
We assumed we knew it all or at least enough to know
We weren't light dissolved.
It doesn't matter. Maybe you'd say, let it go.
"I'm not sea spray. I'm earth and clay. I'm your uncle, your DNA."

But does it matter that I see you in the sea spray now you've gone away?
We're sad, no place to hide the loss...well, the others have it, coat pockets,
children, extra rooms with doors. But I can't  find a way to tamp it down, the sense that all is wrong, somehow, lost.

I wander by the ocean. I wonder how you got here, how you changed into essence when once
You were a man. Life whittled you to your core. And now we're forced to let you go. You're almost gone.
If I didn't find you in the sea spray, I wouldn't know that death is not the end.