LORRIE TOM WRITES

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Good Night and Have a Pleasant Tomorrow

We’re living in 

post pandemic, pre election, 

war raging, cancer killing 

shoot people for no good reason

times. 

But I raise my voice with a poem

louder than nightly news anchors

who read scripts of death and despair with

botox faces, perfect hair, and sparkly teeth. 

Good evening. 

Tonight we begin with this:

Young lovers share

Dairy Queen soft serve

after a long, hot hike 

among ancient Indian ruins.

Ice cream never tasted so good. 


In other news:

Mother and daughter snuggle 

on the couch after watching

Pride and Prejudice for the first time.

They agree Colin Firth

is the only Mr. Darcy. 

And now:

Two families float down 

the Colorado River on a raft.

Rock walls and rapids

shut out everything except

slow time and hanging on.


This story went viral:

Girlfriend calls boyfriend

from an old Yosemite payphone.

Wishes him a happy birthday.

It’s the first time she’s had 

someone waiting at home. 


And in entertainment:

Auntie and niece seen 

singing and stomping on recent grief 

with Harry Styles and 1,000s 

of his happiness-starved fans. 

Breaking news!

Sixty year old woman

seen walking in her garden,

delighting in daffodils 

that busted out of flowerbeds,

deciding to bloom in the middle 

of her path instead.

This just in:

Your happiness memories

are front page news, too. 

Gather them like a 

bouquet of balloons

that can’t be popped by

headlines waiting to drop. 

And that’s the news.

Good night and have a pleasant tomorrow. 

It cracks me up that the only newscaster tagline I remember by heart is Chevy Chase’s from SNL’s Weekend Update. Until I Googled who said that tagline, I thought it might have been Walter Cronkite’s. His was “And that’s the way it is.”

Ironically, I think Chevy Chase’s line fits this poem perfectly! We gotta have a sense of humor about scary and serious times, right?

One of the ways we can do this is write poems that are the perfecit mix of sweet, serious, and snark. We’re not putting our heads in the sand and expecting everything to be rainbows and unicorns awesome, but poetry can give us perspective and respite from reality.

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Here’s how you can write your version of this poem:

  1. Borrow my words. Put the first two stanzas at the top of your page. Put the last two stanzas at the bottom of your page.

  2. Fill in everything in between with your happiness memories.

  3. To keep you writing fast and avoid getting distracted by your inner critic, feel free to keep borrowing the bolded lines at the beginning of each memory stanza.

  4. Alternatively, just write a list of your happiness memories. Don’t worry about being poetic. Pulling up happiness memories like items for your weekly grocery list is what’s important here.

  5. Or, and this might be my favorite, just leave a brief happiness memory in the comments. Then, read everyone’s happiness memories like one big humanity happiness poem.

Reach for these memories when you need them. No matter what you write, it’s a win-win for your well-being.