"[maybe god]," by E. E. Cummings

maybe god

is a child
’s hand)very carefully
bring
-ing
to you and to
me(and quite with
out crushing)the

papery weightless diminutive

world
with a hole in
it out
of which demons with wings would be streaming if
something had(maybe they couldn’t
agree)not happened(and floating-
ly int

o

+ E. E. Cummings

The son of a Christian pastor and a thoughtful theologian in his own right, Cummings often explored theological subjects in his poems. Here he imagines God as a child’s hand both presenting the small, delicate world to us (“to you and / to me”) and at the same time entering that world with compassionate grace (“floating- / ly int / o”). This graceful entrance might be the arrival of Jesus of Nazareth, or the arrival of the Holy Spirit, or both — but in any case, for Cummings, the result is a divine presence that holds death-dealing forces at bay (preventing a potential stream of “demons with wings”). In this sense, the poem is a meditation on God’s ongoing love for us and for the world, picturing that love as a child’s hand “very carefully” giving a gift and protecting its beneficiaries.

Notice how Cummings formats the poem in a way that slows us down as we read, unfolding the central image in a kind of poetic slow motion. A fragile, wispy world with “a hole in / it” — a hole that would be dangerous were it not for God’s buoyant arrival (“floating- / ly”), hovering over the hole in the world as the Spirit once hovered and swept over the abysmal deep (Genesis 1:2). And yet, in this imaginative vision, just as the world is small and fragile in the divine child’s hand (“papery weightless diminutive”), the hole is small, too. Small enough to be no match for God’s love and care. Small enough to be evoked by a single, solitary “o” at the poem’s conclusion.

And so that final “o” may be many things at once: the hole in the world; the great abyss shrunk down to size; the world itself (recalling Julian of Norwich’s hazelnut); an image of the One, the eternal; and a kind of portal, recalling how God characteristically enters “into” the world in unassuming, inconspicuous, often overlooked ways — even through the “o” in “into”!