The prompt for today is to write a For _______ poem. I decided to ask my family to help. The first one was all I needed.
What are you grateful for today,
I ask, and he says,
“For life,”
and that is the end of the poem.
Gratitude List:
- This family
- Good listening and honest talking
- The hammer game
- Wise people
- Making music with my beloveds
Thanksgiving Thoughts:
“You pray for the hungry. Then you feed them.
That is how prayer works.” —Pope Francis
*****
“Allow dark times to season you.” —Hafiz
*****
The Thing Is
Ellen Bass
to love life, to love it even
when you have no stomach for it
and everything you’ve held dear
crumbles like burnt paper in your hands,
your throat filled with the silt of it.
When grief sits with you, its tropical heat
thickening the air, heavy as water
more fit for gills than lungs;
when grief weights you like your own flesh
only more of it, an obesity of grief,
you think, How can a body withstand this?
Then you hold life like a face
between your palms, a plain face,
no charming smile, no violet eyes,
and you say, yes, I will take you
I will love you, again.
*****
My November Guest
by Robert Frost
My Sorrow, when she’s here with me,
Thinks these dark days of autumn rain
Are beautiful as days can be;
She loves the bare, the withered tree;
She walks the sodden pasture lane.
Her pleasure will not let me stay.
She talks and I am fain to list:
She’s glad the birds are gone away,
She’s glad her simple worsted gray
Is silver now with clinging mist.
The desolate, deserted trees,
The faded earth, the heavy sky,
The beauties she so truly sees,
She thinks I have no eye for these,
And vexes me for reason why.
Not yesterday I learned to know
The love of bare November days
Before the coming of the snow,
But it were vain to tell her so,
And they are better for her praise.
Mockingbird Chronicles 