#1 ...and books I long have loved beside me there...

This year's kickoff poem is one that has brought me a lot of peace these past few months. I stumbled across this poem from Grace Noll Crowell on a blog last year and was just enchanted. It's simplistic, certainly, and the feminists will probably be in an uproar over it, but I adore it. I want to find that kind of happiness without needing a trip to Europe or a Land Rover.

Bonus points: Grace Noll Crowell was born in Iowa in 1877 and raised there. Her poems were published in the 1920s and 1930s, many in Good Housekeeping, and allowed her to support her family. She became one of the most published female poets of the 20th century (and yet I'd never heard of her), and is most famous for her inspirational poems, several of which have been turned into hymns.

I Have Found Such Joy
by Grace Noll Crowell

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 a 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.