Thank you: a warm, cozy house

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Next week Thursday my country celebrates thank you. No fireworks. No pink hearts or leprechauns.
No gift buying. In the holiday year, Thanksgiving remains a warm, cozy house with flickering lamp and candle light, with leaves of bittersweet orange and tawny saffron spread on the table. The smells and tastes that hum from the kitchen as we glide and bump around each other jockeying for space to chop, blend with the mixer, stuff the turkey, or watch the Lions play football whisper warmth, and love, and thank you. I rejoice. I simply rejoice.

It's a time when words are hard to find, because either they feel clichéd, or we don't know how to be grateful for the tragedies of existence, while also being thankful for what we hold dear. The words of my dear friend and former boss Ed ring in my ears when I asked him how to thank someone who had written a powerfully supportive recommendation letter for me, for my current job. Wise Ed said, "Sometimes there is nothing more valuable than a simple, heartfelt, thank you."

In the gliding and bumping heart prep for Thanksgiving week, I'd like to share THE DOG-EARED PAGE from the hard copy November issue of The Sun, which touches me, and perhaps will also meet your heart. (I don't believe THE DOG-EARED PAGE can be found in the online edition.) The text below about Merwin is copied directly from The Sun.

Thanks

by W.S. Merwin

New York City-born poet William Stanley Merwin has written more than thirty books of poetry, translation, and prose. A Buddhist and environmentalist, he often addresses humankind's separation from nature in his work. His writing has received two Pulitzer Prizes and a National Book Award, and in 2010, at the age of eighty-two, Merwin was appointed the Library of Congress's Poet Laureate. Since the late 1970s he has lived in Hawaii on a former pineapple plantation that he has restored to its original rain-forest state. "Thanks" was first published in The Rain in the Trees by W. S. Merwin, copyright 1988 by W. S. Merwin. 

Listen

with the night falling we are saying thank you

we are stopping on the bridges to bow from the railings

we are running out of the glass rooms

with our mouths full of food to look at the sky

and say thank you

we are standing by the water thanking it

standing by the windows looking out

in our directions

back from a series of hospitals back from a mugging

after funerals we are saying thank you

after the news of the dead

whether or not we knew them we are saying thank you

over telephones we are saying thank you

in doorways and in the backs of cars and in elevators

remembering wars and the police at the door

and the beatings on stairs we are saying thank you

in the banks we are saying thank you

in the faces of the officials and the rich

and of all who will never change

we go on saying thank you thank you

with the animals dying around us

talking our feelings we are saying thank you

with the forests falling faster than the minutes

of our lives we are saying thank you

with the words going out like cells of a brain

with the cities

growing over us

we are saying thank you faster and faster

with nobody listening we are saying thank you

we are saying thank you and waving

dark though it is

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