Well it's World Book Day innit! Which for parents means a lot of scrabbling around for a costume in the scant time between brekka and the school run, and for the rest of the world means a chance to SING PRAISES for Printing Presses and Libraries who give voice to our Ancestors and offer some kind of earthly afterlife for our own Crazed Imaginations.
So today seems the right day to pin up a poem, having promised the most excellent, Myriam San Marco that I would choose my favourite: a ridiculously impossible task! I've gone for an archetypal favourite instead. It had to be by Alice Oswald, obvs, and this is the first poem I read by her, so it holds extra kudos for changing my life.

Prayer, by Alice Oswald
Here I work in the hollow of God's hand
with Time bent round into my reach. I touch
the circle of the earth, I throw and catch
the sun and moon by turns into my mind.
I sense the length of it from end to end,
I sway me gently in my flesh and each
point of the process changes as I watch;
the flowers come, the rain follows the wind.
And all I ask is this - and you can see
how far the soul, when it goes under flesh,
is not a soul, is small and creaturish -
that every day the sun comes silently
to set my hands to work and that the moon
turns and returns to meet me when it's done.

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