The Wealth of Ordinary Days

I used to think that joy would come
with trumpets sounding from the sky,
some grand event, some distant drum,
some reason larger than the why.

Instead, it came in smaller ways,
a dog asleep beside my chair,
a thunderstorm on summer days,
the scent of rain upon the air.

It came in laughter shared with friends,
in coffee cooling by the page,
in conversations without ends,
in growing older, age by age.

It lived inside familiar hills,
where evening brushed the clouds with gold,
and in the quiet that still fills
the spaces memory can hold.

No monument records such things,
no headlines tell their humble worth;
yet these become the roots and rings
that measure out a life on earth.

So, if tomorrow passes plain,
with nothing history would praise,
I will not count the day in vain—
I live upon such ordinary days.