“There is having by having and having by remembering.“

~ Linda Gregg

December is a good time to sit back and reflect upon the year’s blessings, to acknowledge that despite everything the world threw at us, we lived! And not just lived, but we had our fill of songs, days that were the opposite of a wound, and days when beauty and joy came pouring in. Our proper response is to pause and give thanks, for the manifold blessings received and for every breath that made possible.

Below I’ve selected two poems of thanksgiving (one written under very trying conditions). Hope they will speak to you.

‘Every’ by Wendy Cope

Every ditch or stream or river the train crosses.
Every ploughed field, every row of trees.
Every square church tower in the distance.
Every minute of sunshine, every shadow.
Every wisp of cloud
in the wide, blue, East Anglian sky.
Every day. Every day that’s left

~ Wendy Cope

Wendy Cope OBE (b. 1945) is an English contemporary poet. She read history at St. Hilda’s College, Oxford and now lives in Cambridgeshire. Cope’s poetry collections include Serious Concerns (1992); If I Don’t Know (2001), shortlisted for the Whitbread Poetry Award; Two Cures for Love: Selected Poems 1979–2006 (2008); Family Values (2011); Christmas Poems (2017), a collection of new and previously published Christmas-themed work; and Anecdotal Evidence (2018). She is the author of the prose collection Life, Love and the Archers (2015) and two books for children, Twiddling Your Thumbs (1988) and The River Girl (1991), and the editor of numerous anthologies, including, The Faber Book of Bedtime Stories (1999). A recipient of many poetry awards, she was awarded an Order of the British Empire in 2010.

‘I’m happy living simply‘ by Marina Tsvetaeva

I’m happy living simply:
like a clock, or a calendar.
Worldly pilgrim, thin,
wise—as any creature. To know
the spirit is my beloved.
To come to things—swift
as a ray of light, or a look.
To live as I write: spare—the way
God asks me—and friends do not.

~ Marina Tsvetaeva (1892-1941), translated from the Russian.

This simply-written poem leaves no trace of the hardships Maria Tsvetaeva experienced, having lived through one of the most turbulent years in Russian history. She married Sergei Efron in 1912; they had two daughters and later one son. Efron joined the White Army, and Tsvetaeva was separated from him during the Civil War. During the Moscow famine, Tsvetaeva was forced to place her daughters in a state orphanage, where the younger, Irina, died of hunger in 1919. In 1922 she emigrated with her family to Berlin, then to Prague, settling in Paris in 1925 where the family lived in poverty. Sergei Efron worked for the Soviet secret police, and Tsvetaeva was shunned by the Russian expatriate community of Paris. Through the years of privation and exile, poetry and contact with poets sustained Tsvetaeva. She corresponded with Rainer Maria Rilke and Boris Pasternak, and she dedicated work to Anna Akhmatova. In 1939 Tsvetaeva returned to the Soviet Union only to find out that Efron was executed, and her surviving daughter sent to a labor camp. When the German army invaded the USSR, Tsvetaeva was evacuated to Yelabuga with her son. She hanged herself on August 31, 1941.