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