Sunday Sabbath Poetry: e.e. cummings

College marked an unfortunate gap for me between two flourishing times of reading and writing poetry. In high school, though, e.e. cummings was one of my favorite poets, and the poem below was my favorite by him. I rediscovered it this week and it brought back great memories of flipping through one baffling grammatical mess after another as a teenager, and loving every minute of it. In my humble opinion, the interplay between the second, third, and fourth lines of the first stanza may just be the most playfully romantic thing ever written. I hope you enjoy it as much as I do.

On a different note, you may have noticed a lack of my own poems on the blog recently. Well, I decided finally to submit some of my work for publication in various journals and magazines. Currently I have 24 poems out to eight different publications. We'll see what comes of it; more than anything, I'm just trying to test the waters.

As it relates to this blog, however, the poems can't be published prior to official publication, so I have to stop posting them here! Thus, if you go to old posts, I am taking down any poems I deem worthy to submit there as well. I'm going to keep the Sunday Sabbath Poetry series going, of course, only sans my own work. For any who have enjoyed it -- or, more likely, borne its various birth pangs -- thanks for the support, and I hope you continue to enjoy the series in its new form.

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since feeling is first

By e.e. cummings

since feeling is first
who pays any attention
to the syntax of things
will never wholly kiss you;

wholly to be a fool
while Spring is in the world

my blood approves,
and kisses are a better fate
than wisdom
lady i swear by all flowers. Don't cry
--the best gesture of my brain is less than
your eyelids' flutter which says

we are for each other: then
laugh, leaning back in my arms
for life's not a paragraph

And death i think is no parenthesis