Being Okay

Photo by Barth Bailey on Unsplash

I am going to assume something about you, Dear Ones: I am going to assume you have heard of Mary Oliver, and that her name evokes a similar warm glow in you as it does in me. In today’s breath, I am seeing and feeling the influence of “Wild Geese.” I almost feel like I lifted Mary Oliver's rhythm and structure whole cloth, but I think that is where poems start sometimes. They start in the heart of someone else'e writing. You immerse yourself in their words and you eventually emerge, words and phrases dripping off the end of your hair.

It doesn't really matter

that you couldn't find the word "placebo"

on the Zoom in front of all your friends.

(Or that the word you found was "panacea"--

turning the effect from a gift of the mind

to a blanket easing all life troubles.)

It only matters that, when you drank the last of the tea,

you carried the mug to the kitchen,

wrapped in both hands like a fragile, precious thing,

and when the right word finally dropped in your left ear

you held the still-warm cup to your cheek

and smiled.