Blessed are they who understand

　　My faltering steps and shaking hand.

　　Blessed are those who know my ears today

　　Will strain to catch the words they say.

　　Blessed are they who with a cheery smile

　　Stop to chat for a little while.

　　Blessed are those who never say

　　“You’ve told us that story twice today”.

　　Blessed are those who make it known

　　That I’m loved, respected and not alone.

　　The word “blessed” is a religious word. It means being favoured by God. In modern English we would normally say “blest”, rather than “blessed”. But the writer was thinking about a famous passage in the Bible in which Jesus tells us what sort of people are closest to God. They are not the rich people, or the powerful people, or the famous people. They are poor people, people who carry great sorrow, people who show mercy, people who suffer, and so on. In a modern English Bible, the word that Jesus uses for these people is “blest”. But older people like me remember a much older English translation of the Bible. In England we call it the Authorised Version of the Bible. In America, they call it the King James Bible, because it was translated into English at the beginning of the 17th century, in the reign of King James I. (Do you remember the podcast about the Fifth of November? King James was the king whom Guy Fawkes tried to blow up.) The Authorised Version of the Bible is sometimes difficult to understand, because it uses English which is very different from modern English. But it is very beautiful and poetic, and it was the version of the Bible used in churches in England for more than 300 years. And in the Authorised Version, the word which Jesus uses to talk about people who are close to God is “blessed”. And that is why the word “blessed” is used in this poem.