Prayer for the Day

by Revd Canon David White

20th April 2025 - Easter Sunday

i thank You God for this amazing
day: for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
and a blue dream of sky; and for everything
which is natural which is infinite which is yes

(i who have died am alive again today,
and this is the sun’s birthday; this is the birth
day of life and of love and wings: and of the gay
great happening illimitably earth)

how should tasting touching hearing seeing
breathing any–lifted from the no
of all nothing–human merely being
doubt unimaginable You?

(now the ears of my ears awake and
now the eyes of my eyes are opened)
e.e.cummings (1894 – 1962)

This poem, by the American poet and painter, e e cummings, is offered as a meditation on Easter Day.

The poem has allusions to sunshine, springtime, new birth, wakening and thanksgiving. Cummings was a prolific writer of poetry and is said to have written nearly 3,000 poems. He was a poetry pioneer who did not stick to linguistic rules or traditional poetic form, preferring his own distinct personal style and unusual punctuation.

Cummings was influenced in his childhood by his father being a Presbyterian Church Minister, but as an adult he was never what might be described as an orthodox Christian. Nevertheless, this poem shows he saw God as creator and the resurrection as something of inexplicable wonder, “the birth day of life and of love and wings:”