Thursday, February 08, 2007

If I Had Only

If I had only…
forgotten future greatness
and looked at the green things and the buildings
and reached out to those around me
and smelled the air
and ignored the forms and the self-styled obligations
and heard the rain on the roof
and put my arms around my wife
… and it’s not too late.

From Notes to Myself by Hugh Prather
For more on Prather see www.beliefnet.com






2 comments:

dianne p said...

You are way too young to be reading Hugh Prather - lol. When I was a student at Kent State in the early 70s, his books were pretty popular. One of his poems influenced my decision to become a nurse rather than get a PhD in what was then a pretty esoteric field -
"Ideas are clean. They soar in the supreme heavens. I can take them out and look at them, they fit in books, they lead me down that narrow way. And in the morning they are there. Ideas are straight - but the world is round, and a messy mortal is my friend - come walk with me in the mud..."
I left the world of *ideas* of experimental psychology to become a nurse and walk with real people in the mud. No regrets.

Jonathan Foster said...

wow. that is a beautiful poem. thanks for sharing. that's very cool.