Gratitude: A Poem
Walt Whitman once said that laughing flesh was enough. Good company was enough - Assuming you like the company, it is so. Epicurus said that friendship, adequate shelter and food,freedom and time for thought, that is enough... How his name grew associated with gold-plated spoons is one of histories little ironies.
The Beatles posited that love is all you need, which clearly is oversimplifying the matter: Romeo and Juliet had love but their raging hormones, and sense of melodrama and entitlement led to singularly stupid ends,and if you are speaking of a more general, charitable love,how happy do you think the average humanitarian is with always another unfortunate to help, and billions more beyond
her reach?
The mind plays a cruel trick upon our psyches, where it adjusts your expectations so that the pariah may feel atop the world when given a smile and the prizewinner droop upon receiving the silver one is tempted to find fault with the unsatisfied winner, to tell the truth any one of us would have felt the same, including a leper you passed on the streets of Kolkata,given treatment, emotional support, and a few years of wealth,give anyone a CEO’s pay for a decade and they scream when it is reduced by a tenth.
We are living in a matrix not of computer simulation but of a masquerade we ourselves create, not letting the true wonder of the world in there is so much of it we could annihilate our intellects, replaced by constant agape and ‘mazement.
So today I would like to be grateful for the moments when the deception slipped a little, when I felt your hand envelope mine,
when I trotted to my room with an armful of fairy tales,when I put on my contacts and saw the stars with renewed clarity when I stopped reading and talking and listening to music and ate my gooey apple cobbler with my eyes shut,letting the trills of brown sugar dissolve in my tongue, no barrier of inattention between us.
You don’t have to believe someone is at the other end saying "Thank you" keeps your eyes open a little longer.
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Donaya Haymond
http://sites.google.com/site/legendsoflaconiausa/
http://www.facebook.com/pages/manage/?act=46206608#/pages/Donaya-Haymond/193150455153
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