Dearer to me than the evening star
A Packard car, a Hershey bar
Or a bride in her rich adorning
Dearer than any of these by far
Is to lie in bed in the morning.
This poem comes to me on loop these cold winter mornings, hand resting on sleeping Charlie. Jean Kerr wrote it when she was eight, and it’s in the introduction to her hilarious book about her domestic life, Please Don’t Eat the Daisies.
Funny that a random poem by a kid that I randomly read as a kid has Velcroed itself to my adult consciousness, but I think many of us carry around some odd fragment, a song, a saying, a poem, a visual, that drifts in like an old friend, circles into soothing familiarity, deepens the moment.
I love the poem’s nursery rhyme cadence. I love how she began with the sweeping evening star and ended on prosaic sleeping in, which establishes “dearer” as everywhere, and precious. That’s what I think, after I think about it.
Dearer still, though, by far, is the way it makes me feel: profoundly happy to be alive.