Quote of the Day: A Little (April) Prayer

Let us be thankful, Lord, for little things –
The song of birds, the rapture of the rose;
Cloud-dappled skies, the laugh of limpid springs,
Drowned sunbeams and the perfume April blows;
Bronze wheat a-shimmer, purple shade of trees –
Let us be thankful, Lord of Life, for these!

Let us be praiseful, Sire, for simple sights; –
The blue smoke curling from a fire of peat;
Keen stars a-frolicking on frosty nights,
Prismatic pigeons strutting in a street;
Daisies dew-diamonded in smiling sward –
For simple sights let us be praiseful, Lord!

Let us be grateful, God, for health serene,
The hope to do a kindly deed each day;
The faith of fellowship, a conscience clean,
The will to worship and the gift to pray;
For all of worth in us, of You a part,
Let us be grateful, God, with humble heart–Robert W. Service

Gosh.  I believe in being grateful.  (A search of this website will probably make the point.)  But there are times of the year when my sense of gratitude flags a little.

And this might be one of them.

To take on several of the points expressed in his April poem by the inimitable RWS (about whom I wrote, pretty comprehensively, here–The Bard of the Yukon: Celebrating Robert W. Service):

• I am grateful for the songs of birds.  Really I am.  Still, Chinggis the rooster.  He never shuts up.  From dawn to dusk.  Never.  Ever.  Loud.  Insistent.  Repetitive.  Rather pointless.  Like a few of the guys I know.
• As for rapturous roses, perhaps mine have bigger and more abundant thorns than most.  Dunno.  What I do know is that pruning, caring for, feeding them is often painful.  The results?  Sometimes they’re worth it.
• “The perfume April blows”?  Often it’s the manure in the barn, the scent of which becomes more prevalent as the days gradually warm up.
• The skies around here aren’t so “cloud-dappled” at this time of year.  More leaden gray.  Less “limpid springs.”  More “raging torrents.”  As for the purple shade of trees, there isn’t much shade–purple or otherwise–as most trees aren’t in leaf yet, and the wheat certainly isn’t “shimmering” all that much.  (Robert W. Service was a native of Lancashire in the UK, and spent much of his life in Western Canada.  I can’t even imagine what he was thinking when he wrote this bilge.)
• I’m all about being grateful for simple sights, I can pretty much roll with the second stanza–blue smoke and frosty nights, although the daisies haven’t even perked up their heads yet around here.  But, “For simple sights, let us be praiseful, Lord.”  I get that.
• He nails it in stanza three.  We should indeed be grateful for “health serene” and the chance to “do a kindly deed each day.”

And the last four lines,

The faith of fellowship, a conscience clean,
The will to worship and the gift to pray;
For all of worth in us, of You a part,
Let us be grateful, God, with humble heart.

Are perfection itself.

All in all, he’s right. It’s the little things that make a life a life.

God bless the little things.