Telling the Truth

Here’s a lovely Happy Weekend poem from Amy.
Written for “people like you and me.”

Daydreaming

Hurry scurry, worry flurry,
Such a fuss and such a hurry.
Down I slid by a private stair
To a room in a forest of maidenhair.

The glistening walls were of mother of pearl;
The roof was a moonstone; the delicate twirl
Of a kind of coiled ladder sprang up from the floor
Of loveliest opal. The low, swinging door
Had a way of opening silently
To people like you and me.

In the room was a sea pool made
In a hollow and carven slab of jade.
And coral polyps and corallines spread
Their pink and purple; and sea things fed
Each in his fashion. The room, like a shell,
Curved softly and smoothly; for a lamp, there fell
A great white Indian star from the sky.
And into that room slipped I.

Hurry scurry, worry flurry,
“Where’s the child? Catch her. Hurry!
Absent-minded again!” My ear
Thought it heard, but it did not hear
Really and properly, you know,
For I was slipping and sliding so
That I couldn’t listen. At last I curled,
Safe in my dear little inside world,
In the cool, green forest of maidenhair fern,
As they clawed the outside of me and said,
“Come, learn your Tamil grammar, and do your sums.”

But I was apart where nobody comes
But foolish people like you and me
Who are far, far, far from what they should be.

Amy Carmichael, Mountain Breezes: The Collected Poems of Amy Carmichael, p. 400;
© 1999, The Dohnavur Fellowship, published by Christian Literature Crusade.
First published in Gold Cord, 1932.

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© Elouise Renich Fraser, 6 March 2015
Photo from http://www.naturephotos.com