Hannah Sorenson’s Reviews > Little Alleluias: Collected Poetry and Prose > Status Update

^You too can be carved anew by the details of your devotion.^

^It is the performance of this hour only, the dawning of the day, fresh and ever new. This is to say nothing against afternoons evenings or even midnight. Each has its portion of the spectacular. But dawn—dawn is a gift.^

^Every day my early morning walk along the water grants me a second waking.^

Foreword for Long Life

^In this book you will find, set among the prose pieces, a few poems. Think of them that way, as little alleluias. They’re not trying to explain anything, as the prose does. They just sit there on the page, and breathe.^

Title spotted!

Gratitude

^then the deep cup of the hour of silence^

On Losing a House

^1.

The bumble bees
know where their home is.
They have memorized
every stalk and leaf
of the field.
They fall from the air at
exactly
the right place,
they crawl
under the soft grasses,
they enter
the darkness
humming.^

Gravel

^9.

I look up
into the faces of the stars,
into their deep silence.^

^5.
[…]
Have I walked
long enough
where the sea breaks raspingly
all day and all night upon the pale sand?

Have I admired sufficiently the little hurricane
of the hummingbird?^

cont’d

I am touching a few leaves.
I am noticing the way the yellow butterflies
move together, in a twinkling cloud, over the field.

And I am thinking: maybe just looking and listening
is the real work.

Maybe the world, without us,
is the real poem.^

From The Book of Time

^1.

I rose this morning early as usual, and went to my desk.
But it's spring,

and the thrush is in the woods,
somewhere in the twirled branches, and he is singing.

And so, now, I am standing by the open door.
And now I am stepping down onto the grass.