Happy Day, my friends. We’re getting on toward the weekend. Thank you for reading, sharing, and general love for poetry. Even my poetry. 😉 XX, M

Just want to ask anyone who reads this post to kiss Jack Johnson for me if you see him. Oh, and invite him, Jack Johnson, to come and play at my son’s 16th birthday!

Jack, from a Mother,
with love

Sometimes,
you have to write
love poems to people
you may never meet.
Here is mine:
Jack,
We, my people and I,
Have listened to you,
Jack,
their whole lives.
I have to say ‘their’
whole lives because I
found you on a foggy
day in Anchorage,
Alaska. Bubbly Toes
and all. A CD player
in the white honda
accord. I was 19.
When they, my boys,
were small
and still afraid of Mike
Wazowski. You know,
Mike, he’s scary.
He scares children.
On purpose. One eye.
My boys understood
exactly what you
were saying. It
Is. Completely.
Utterly. Better.
When we are
together, Jack.
I don’t mean you
and I, or you and me,
but me and them, Jack
You sang it best.
And you turned
our whole world
Upside Down for
the better. In fact,
that is exactly what
We’ve done. My boys
and I, we’ve tried
to share the love
We’ve found with
everyone. And,
you know, I think
it is working.
With love, M

Ocean in the Bay

there is a time that is tattooed
in my memory, it will never be extracted
We were on Crown Beach, in the San
Francisco Bay, and somehow,
All of Us– Mothers and children,

Grandmothers, mothers and
daughters, sons, and cousins, and
grandchildren, we swam into the
tide. We rocked in the waves; we
laughed out loud with joy in the
shift of the spray, mousse, and suds

god, that memory will sustain
me until the end of my days
an inaudible melody of the past
so whole, so common,
so elemental,
so joy

Oh, she knew

Oh, she knew
every step in this
dance

She walked in strength,
threaded through the lecterns to
shake

his hand, who would
never have given Her the same grace and
humanity

Of course, she knew,
to live your life in the skin of a
woman

You’d have to know,
what a task, what a challenge, what a
gift

“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.” – Rainer Maria Rilke

Let it Be

Let it overwhelm you
the unwashed windows
and dishes and uncut grass

Let it be heavy, the
loneliness, the longing, the
unfilled space

Let it be exhausting, to be with
others and support them when you
can barely support yourself

Let it be Wednesdays of barely
making it. Fridays of surrender, and Sundays of
wishing you could have just one more.

Let it be weary when you wish you had the
energy to help one more human with
their diction and syntax

Let it be a complete let-down to
go to the grocery store at 9 p.m. under the too-green
neon lights, the alien otherworld before you sleep

Let it be 6 a.m. and you simply cannot
want for the slow coffee of Saturdays the physical newspaper,
black ink and real paper in your hands

Let it be too much to drink at happy hour on a Thursday
when you know you’ll pay for it
the very next day, poor move

Let it be hiding from virtual bread crumbs that somehow
you created and left for yourself, unanswered
texts and plans gone cold