It is Thanksgiving Thursday, one of my favorite holidays of the year – a favorite because it gives me ample opportunity to spend time with my family and comes with fewer demands on my time as a pastor. This year, for the first time in many, all three of our children will be together at our house for dinner.

The following poem – filled with subtle humor and deep gratitude – is also one of my favorites. It moves me to deep thankfulness and I offer it hoping that it might do the same for you. Because I located it in its entirety on “poem hunter,” I offer it here (I want to be faithful to the creative work of authors and the copyright laws which try and protect that creativity. The book from which it comes was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1996.

Alive Together Lisel Mueller (b. 1924)

Speaking of marvels, I am alive
together with you, when I might have been
alive with anyone under the sun,
when I might have been Abelard's woman
or the whore of a Renaissance pope
or a peasant wife with not enough food
and not enough love, with my children
dead of the plague. I might have slept
in an alcove next to the man
with the golden nose, who poked it
into the business of stars,
or sewn a starry flag
for a general with wooden teeth.
I might have been the exemplary Pocahontas
or a woman without a name
weeping in Master's bed
for my husband, exchanged for a mule,
my daughter, lost in a drunken bet.
I might have been stretched on a totem pole
to appease a vindictive god
or left, a useless girl-child,
to die on a cliff. I like to think
I might have been Mary Shelley
in love with a wrong-headed angel,
or Mary's friend. I might have been you.
This poem is endless, the odds against us are endless,
our chances of being alive together
statistically nonexistent;
still we have made it, alive in a time
when rationalists in square hats
and hatless Jehovah's Witnesses
agree it is almost over,
alive with our lively children
who--but for endless ifs--
might have missed out on being alive
together with marvels and follies
and longings and lies and wishes
and error and humor and mercy
and journeys and voices and faces
and colors and summers and mornings
and knowledge and tears and chance.

From Alive Together: New and Selected Poems (1996)
Also found on www.poemhunter.com

With Faith and With Feathers,

David

P.S. I will be posting my weekly sermons on my other blog, Bard's Brushstrokes. I hope you check it out.