Poetry on Odyssey: Growing Thankfulness

It's not Thanksgiving anymore, but I don't believe that we're only supposed to feel thankful one day a year. Besides, I have so much to be thankful for! I am engaged to the most amazing man, I have the most amazing family and am about to grow it, I'm almost done with this crazy semester of school, I'm writing tons of poetry and I'm getting ready to study abroad in Argentina. I have been so blessed.

This year my fiance and I got to spend Thanksgiving at my parents' house in Colorado, along with my brother, my sister and her husband and his family. We had a ton of people and a ton of food and it was such a good time.

We started out the meal with a liturgy my dad and I wrote, a list of Bible verses about being thankful. Then, before we gorged ourselves, I read my thankfulness poem:

Praise like wildflowers; our hearts
are petals reaching for the sun.
You are sun. You are
cradle warmth, firelight—
glowing and enveloping; you are life.

We are subtle blinking, infinitely
mortal. Temporary and fragile,
windblown and face down, and you
are calloused fingers,
gently fixing, watering, replanting,
you are dewdrops washing our tears away,
you are rich soil; we are
building our roots into all that you are,
timidly growing toward life,
toward forgiveness, toward light—
timidly learning
to give thanks.