Smallest Things
It’s time to watch now for the smallest things:
How quick the little baby up the block
Has grown and now begun to walk;
How early in the day the robin sings;
How even just a passing stranger’s smile brings
The sense we’re still somehow quite interlocked
One to the other, still can feel, can talk,
Can whistle in the dark, can even sing.
For big things, so it seems. have all gone bad:
Decayed, collapsed, betrayed our deepest trust.
They totter strangely, just about to fall.
And yet we must not let ourselves be sad;
Must hold to faith and not become nonplussed:
The Greatest Thing is hiding in the small.
Jeffrey Essmann is an essayist and poet living in New York. His poetry has appeared in numerous magazines and literary journals, among them Dappled Things, the St. Austin Review, Amethyst Review, Pensive Journal, Forma Journal, and The Society of Classical Poets. He is a certified catechist with the Archdiocese of New York, a Benedictine oblate of St. Mary’s Abbey in Morriston, NJ, and editor of The Catholic Poetry Room page on the Integrated Catholic Life website.
Amethyst Review 