Sometimes I am candled and lit by sunlight streaming straight through cool clean sea wind, setting my wonder aflame with the mellow joy often found in a glass of wine, ablaze even in the outdoors as I trace sparse and ornamental greens upon the branches of what counts as city nature. Call me a kid, but I could inspect the topography of garden soil for an hour even as the loam pulsates with worms, call me an idiot, but I could place my face into the folds of a rose blossom for minutes to let its perfume dissipate car exhaust about the corners of my couch-fabric coat. And in these small moments I am alive and unafraid, ready to donate money to the homeless after marching in a Labor Day parade. But then I get the feeling that something isn't real beneath all that joy, as though an adult walked by and told me to take a shower. I am fortunate for the wonder even when it passes by as quickly as it swelled from a secret way kept under all these clothes and skin.

For those of you who are free from the establishment of terror that bureaucratizes thoughts, I envy you. Such an existence almost seems like innocence and naivete when agents of suffering are gaining new footholds on the world. But also, I am terrorized by conventions, harrowed by the routine matters involved in micro-economics, angst-ridden after too many failed dealings with institutions. School couldn't help me graduate, mental hospitals couldn't cure me, and life only sends its best regards in the accomplishments of others. Larger and less self-centered is the suffering worldwide; famines, corruption, droughts, disease, wars, and death which we ignore in order to hum happily along in tune with our fellow happy hummers.

But we have lost our wonder, our child-like appraisal, despite retaining our ignorance. We can lose our ignorance and improve our wonder, it is possible, just difficult.

I Am Waiting

By Lawrence Ferlinghetti

I am waiting for my case to come up
and I am waiting
for a rebirth of wonder
and I am waiting for someone
to really discover America
and wail
and I am waiting
for the discovery
Of a new symbolic western frontier
and I am waiting
for the American Eagle
to really spread its wings
and straighten up and fly right
and I am waiting for the Age of Anxiety
to drop dead
and I am waiting
for the war to be fought
which will make the world safe
for anarchy
and I am waiting for the final withering away
of all governments
and I am perpetually awaiting
a rebirth of wonder


I am waiting for the second coming
And I am waiting
For a religious revival
To sweep thru the state of Arizona
And I am waiting
For the grapes of wrath to stored
And I am waiting
For them to prove
That God is really American
And I am waiting
To see God on television
Piped into church altars
If they can find
The right channel
To tune it in on
And I am waiting
for the last supper to be served again
and a strange new appetizer
and I am perpetually awaiting
a rebirth of wonder


I am waiting for my number to be called
and I am waiting
for the Salvation Army to take over
and I am waiting
for the meek to be blessed
and inherit the earth
without taxes
and I am waiting
for forests and animals
to reclaim the earth as theirs
and I am waiting
for a way to be devised
to destroy all nationalisms
without killing anybody
and I am waiting
for linnets and planets to fall like rain
and I am waiting for lovers and weepers
to lie down together again
in a new rebirth of wonder


I am waiting for the great divide to be crossed
and I anxiously waiting
For the secret of eternal life to be discovered
By an obscure practitioner
and I am waiting
for the storms of life
to be over
and I am waiting to set sail for happiness
and I am waiting
for a reconstructed Mayflower
to reach America
with its picture story and TV rights
sold in advance to the natives
and I am waiting
for the lost music to sound again
in the Lost Continent
in a new rebirth of wonder


I am waiting for the day
that maketh all things clear
and I am waiting for retribution
for what America did to Tom Sawyer
and I am waiting
for the American Boy
to take off Beauty's clothes
and get on top of her
and I am waiting
for Alice in Wonderland
to retransmit to me
her total dream of innocence
and I am waiting
for Childe Roland to come
to the final darkest tower
and I am waiting for Aphrodite
to grow live arms
at a final disarmament conference
in a new rebirth of wonder


I am waiting
to get some intimations
of immortality
by recollecting my early childhood
and I am waiting
for the green mornings to come again
for some strains of unpremeditated art
to shake my typewriter
and I am waiting to write
the great indelible poem
and I am waiting
for the last long rapture
and I am perpetually waiting
for the fleeting lovers on the Grecian Urn
to catch each other at last
and embrace
and I am awaiting
perpetually and forever
a renaissance of wonder