My world was little and cozy-tight,
Snug and smug in it's dim half-light;
And, though it was too small inside
For me to stretch my arms out wide
Or let me stand up straight and tall,
This annoyed me not at all.
I crouched in my small world each day,
Content to doze the hours away -
Till a stray sunbeam, quite lost, I'm sure,
Found it's way through a crack in my door.
A wandering thought it might have been,
But it shone with a brightness I'd never seen,
And it lighted my world's dimlit way
And it tempted me forth to a sunbright day.
I opened the door and stepped outside
Into a new world, high and wide!
With outstretched arms to embrace it all,
I felt my soul stand straight and tall,
And I knew that I could never go back
To that little world with it's pitiful lack
Of all that made life glow and shine,
Now that this wider world was mine.
So I closed the door and I turned the key
On that little world and that little me,
And I raised my face to the open sky
In a world love-wide and heaven-high!
~Helen Lowrie Marshall
I was looking through one of my year books and found this poem in it and I googled it because I wanted to know the author and I found it on your blog thank you for sharing it is a beautiful poem.
ReplyDeleteHi.
ReplyDeleteI actually Google this once recently, but must have had it backward. It is been haunting me, because I recall that my mother gave me a book with this poem in it in the early to mid 80s. I don't know what happened to my book. I could not remember the author's name, but the only author I kept coming up on was Helen Steiner Rice. I just verified tonight that she was not the writer of the book I had. So I, to googled the line I remember, the final line of this poem, and got right to your site.
the irony of it popping up so simply is that I was just looking at all the poetry indexes that are online prior to that desperate Google effort. I don't know if I could have use those poetry indexes, but I'm VERY glad I didn't have to.
Thank you, thank you, thank you 😊