April is Poetry Month – Day 14

I am a homebody.  There are few things I love more than being at home, puttering about the house, digging in the garden, putting clean linens on the beds and tables, filling a vase with flowers, replacing burnt down candles in the candlesticks, putting away the last of the clean dishes, and generally making my home a welcoming, pleasant place to be.  A few years ago I came across a poet, Grace Noll Crowell, whose poems resonated with me because she, too, liked the simple pleasures of home.  Her sentiments are out of fashion these days so almost no one has heard of her, but she was appointed the Poet Laureate of Texas in the 1930’s and was very popular while she was writing.

Here is the first poem of hers that I read.  It is still my favorite:

I have found such joy in simple things;
A plain, clean room, a nut-brown loaf of bread,
A cup of milk, a kettle as it sings,
The shelter of a roof above my head,
And in a leaf-laced square along the floor,
Where yellow sunlight glimmers through the door.

I have found such joy in things that fill
My quiet days: a curtain’s blowing grace,
A potted plant upon my window sill,
A rose, fresh-cut and placed within a vase;
A table cleared, a lamp beside a chair,
And books I long have loved beside me there.

Oh, I have found such joys I wish I might
Tell every woman who goes seeking far
For some elusive, feverish delight,
That very close to home the great joys are:
The elemental things- old as the race,
Yet never, through the ages, commonplace.

~ Grace Noll Crowell