So Much Happiness by Naomi Shihab Nye

 http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/so-much-happiness/

So Much Happiness

Naomi Shihab Nye

It is difficult to know what to do with so much happiness.
With sadness there is something to rub against,
a wound to tend with lotion and cloth.
When the world falls in around you, you have pieces to pick up,
something to hold in your hands, like ticket stubs or change.
But happiness floats.
It doesn't need you to hold it down.
It doesn't need anything.
Happiness lands on the roof of the next house, singing,
and disappears when it wants to.
You are happy either way.
Even the fact that you once lived in a peaceful tree house
and now live over a quarry of noise and dust
cannot make you unhappy.
Everything has a life of its own,
it too could wake up filled with possibilities
of coffee cake and ripe peaches,
and love even the floor which needs to be swept,
the soiled linens and scratched records…..
Since there is no place large enough
to contain so much happiness,
you shrug, you raise your hands, and it flows out of you
into everything you touch. You are not responsible.
You take no credit, as the night sky takes no credit
for the moon, but continues to hold it, and share it,
and in that way, be known.


I haven't posted a poem in a while, so here's one I read a while ago. I think Nye does a wonderful job of writing about how happiness feels, as much as you can explain it, anyway: how it "floats," then "lands on the roof of the next house," and "flows out of you into everything you touch." Isn't that so absolutely true?

Because it's an extra-special day (why not?), here's another quote:
"Poetry calls us to pause. There is so much we overlook, while the abundance around us continues to shimmer, on its own.”
-Naomi Shihab Nye
(found here: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/naomi-shihab-nye)

To happiness flowing out of us into the world around us, and seeing the shimmering.