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