With no intention my tiny granddaughter pierces my heart. How can she look back at us with such a wise & regal gaze when she is only three months into her life journey?

   "I arrived in the star-filled dark,/ found myself remembering/ the first time I woke/ astonished,/ next to someone beautiful."

   Thank you, Stephen Dunn.

   Seeing this image, I thought of how you & I awake next to beauty every day & often find it hidden because of another reality described by Dunn in a different poem: "Bosnians, Sudanese, flicker into our lives,/ flicker out. To think of them is to lose/ any right to complain."

   But, I do complain. The starvation, the torture, the thirst in the world for water & for love. Who can find Beauty amid such flickers of horror except by imagining how caregivers like you reach out with Love to meet need.

   After Dunn writes of waking up "next to someone beautiful" he crowns our lives with his next verse: "Always I wanted to save/ the word magnificent/…for what truly lifts the ceiling."

   Thank you for your moments of magnificence – for how you brighten a world filled with suffering.

   Thank you for the times when you "lift the ceiling," offering a glimpse of paradise.

-Erie Chapman