Güd wrtr

(Irish: happiness, joy)

•••

Sonas ort, the Irish say,
happiness on you,
my Irish friend tells me,

and in her lilt, I long for
the voice of my Irish
grandfather, who could

turn on a brogue in an instant.
Would he have known “sonas”?
Of course, he would,

from his mam and pap,
whom he came to call Mom
and Dad after they settled

in Chicago. And I feel my
ears pulling in a long-ago
direction to hear the music

of his voice that died more
than a half century ago,
too young at 64, younger

than I am now. Would that
he were around to explain,
as my young Irish friend does,

that sonas means not only
happiness, but also good
fortune and prosperity.

More important, I learn that
sonas requires a connection
to ancestors, their stories,

the ground they trod,
along with a longing for
that ancestral place.

I try to find calm,
the completeness,
the comfort

and happiness in all
that—even in the sudden
rush of missing him, the first

of four grandparents to die,
the one whose pipe smoke
arrives now and then with

the rustle of breeze through
leaves, the ones brittling now,
the ones soon to fall.

•••

With thanks to Jenny Cox of Clonmel, Ireland,
for telling me about “sonas” in my online writing group,
giving me a prompt that turned into this poem.

The first all-day rainy day calls for
donning the plum rain boots

as you head out for afternoon errands,
reminding yourself how to drive

on slick streets, to come to careful
and complete stops before proceeding.

Though you have things to do, you are
drawn to the edge of a parking lot

where the Chinese pistache trees
model the year’s most brilliant colors

while beginning to discard some of
what has clothed them since spring

in a mosaic of slick color at the curb.
Of course, you have to take a photograph

of this rich palette of loveliness—then
another and another. No wonder you

linger under these gently dripping trees
that punctually deliver this seasonal

fashion show before dropping everything
to stand proud and bare and tall

all winter long.

We are all hurling through space on a rock,
and we’re all going to die. You would think
we could be holding hands and singing.
—John Bradshaw

•••

Give me your hand. Here’s mine.
Whatever we think makes us different
is not as important as what makes
us human.

So human to human, let us not think
of division, of subtraction. Let us think
of multiplication, of adding my 1 to yours,
and to his and hers and theirs

as we stand on this sphere of rock
slowly rotating on an axis we can’t see,
in these brief lives between
the first breath and the last,
the first heartbeat and the last.

We are the bridge between
the ordinary and extraordinary.
Let us not curse the darkness
but instead light a candle
for each other and all beings
everywhere.

Who doesn’t need a blessing,
another hand reaching for ours?

And, while we’re at it—
one plus one plus one plus one
and on and on—let’s raise our voices
in song, add a little harmony to feel
the chord of many resonating
deep inside our chests.

May we hold hands and sing
as long and as loud as we can,
together, until the last breath.

Amen.

Though the weather has not
chilled enough to holler Soup!,
on November’s first Sunday night,

after chopping up the Holy Trinity
of Soup, as my friend Lisa taught me—
celery, carrots and onion—

I dig out the new big pot, locate
the olive oil and seasonings, mostly
ignored since last soup season.

Tomorrow is Momday, as Mondays
were for years, the day I’d drive my
90-something mother to the gym,

the chiropractor, lunch at her favorite
restaurant, the grocery store for liters
of Moscato and maybe, nearing home,

up the hill into the state park to check
on the lake she and Father moved my
sister and me to in the summer of 1966..

Now, almost 60 years later, it’s officially
fall. She will want soup. Or someone will,
I think, as I sauté the Holy Trinity.

Certainly my fella whom tomorrow
I will drive to and from the “mean lady
who’s gonna pull my teeth,” he moaned

about this trip to the dentist he loves
“most of the time.” I’m sympathetic,
but this man is no lightweight,

having survived cardiac arrest, then
resurrection by defibrillator, followed
by open heart surgery six years ago.

Nonetheless, I’ve already set eight
little cups of custard in his fridge,
made from his late mother’s recipe.

Tomorrow I’ll bring split pea with ham,
his favorite. Hers, too. Ma, if I knew your
address in heaven, I’d get soup to you.

Neither of us imagined that—of the two
of us cooking-impaired women who’d
rather read—I would become

a purveyor of comfort food for my
dear ones. But here I am, still
a beginner in the kitchen at 67,

but wicked good at a few things,
especially Grandma’s brownies,
which, when I think of it,

with the soup and custards—
the greatest of these, after all, is love—
makes a pretty fine Holy Trinity, too.

Now that time has fallen back
an hour, I drive down L Street
shaking my head at the trees
still swathed in green, the leaves
stuck tight to the precise spots
where they were born.

In other parts of this hemisphere,
their brethren have already taken to
wearing gold and crimson sweaters
before becoming the fallen. But here,
many of us stubbornly cling to what
feels like our place, holding on to
the illusion of permanence.

This month we have no choice.
The signal will come to let go, and
if we do not, we will be released.
Which is the way of things.
All our cries cannot stop it.

But never mind—look at this day,
we say to each other—cloudless
blue-sky lovely, doing an excellent
imitation of spring.

On a day like today, it doesn’t seem
as if winter could ever tiptoe in,
delivering sorely needed rain,
lowering the temperature a degree
or two each day before it really
gets down to business.

And it will, as we who have
weathered many winters well know.

There we go, getting lost in
what’s coming instead of relishing
what’s here. As if we can change
the season, forgetting that after
a time—less than we think—

it, too, will pass,
and we will leaf again.

I love me some homophones, though
not the kind at home that once plugged
into the wall, and not bipedal primates,

but words that sound the same
but are spelled differently,
each unique in meaning,

which creates problems for folks
both familiar with and new to English,
an admittedly wacky language.

A friend recently asked about the spelling
of peak, as in mountain, to which I said,
yep, the eak is the one you want,

since it’s the one with an “a,” and a capital
A resembles a (hello!) peak. There’s also
pique, which I love, a fancy way to irritate

or interest someone, both of which have
an “i” in them—and the que is just fun.
But my favorite trick that my fourth grade

teacher pressed into this word nerd’s
impressionable little brain, is that peek
has two “e”s that look, if you squint,

like little eyes, and since it means to look,
well… Go take a peek at a peak
that piques your interest!

Write good poems and let go of them. Publish them, read them, go on writing.
—Natalie Goldberg, from “Writing Down the Bones”

•••

Buddhist monks train for years to create
intricate mandalas of colorful sand,
spending days of meditative work

to painstakingly build them, then,
when finished, ceremoniously brush
the sand into a pile, place it in an urn,

and pour it into a nearby river,
carrying the blessings of those holy souls
to the ocean to spread throughout

the world. The lesson of impermanence
teaches that everything, no matter
how beautiful, is not meant to exist

forever—a teaching I find myself
brushing up against here and here,
there and there, over the past year.

Again and again, what felt lasting
has been dismantled, scooped up,
taken away in rubble, in ashes,

and my little heart aches with each
passage. Which is why, for 1,095 days
now, I have put my sand mandalas

in poetry form into the world, without
expectation of acknowledgment,
to write them and release them,

awash in imperfection, so humanly
human, as I practice humility and
the hard lesson of letting go

again and again and again.

•••

Today marks three years that I’ve been daily sending these poetic sand mandalas into the ether with no expectation that they’ll be seen or acknowledged… though so many have, and for that I am grateful.

I continue to be inspired by long-time daily poets like Esther Cohen and Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer and others like James Crews who generously offer their work regularly on social media and on websites. Their words and those of other writers—younger and older, living and dead—are what feeds creativity in us all.

Everyone needs a bit of kindness
to unwrap and bite into, and someone
once said that if they ask, it shall be given,
so I give chocolate to the inflatable T-Rex

appearing at my door, along with six skeletons,
assorted princesses and ninjas, and black-clad
teen boys wearing open backpacks on their
chests, their loot winking like treasure.

Before all the hubbub began, I walked
across the street carrying three small
chocolate bars to give to a young neighbor
named Johann, who correctly identified

the common letters in both our names,
then, smiling, held up a mint green kids’
camera, politely asking, “Can I take
your picture?” And when I agreed,

he pushed the button to elicit a Polaroid’s
familiar zzzzzt. Though I was standing
in the doorway, backlit, and I knew
the exposure would be wonky,

we watched the photo develop—Johann,
his sister Hannah in their father’s arms,
and me, the old lady across the street.
“Magic,” Johann pronounced.

And, as we studied the little rectangle
that gradually revealed a pink-shirted
woman wearing a gauzy halo—
a costume I had not planned on—

I could not disagree.

It may seem ghoulish to some
to walk my neighborhood cemetery
the day before the day before
the day of the dead,

but I like to pay my respects
to the souls of the ones buried
and interred here as I walk,
trying to name all my beloved dead.

The list gets longer each year, of course,
the price of living, as I compare the ages
on so many headstones to my own
or to those who have recently died.

Too soon, I think, of the one who left recently at 79.
Good run, I think, of the one who floated into mystery
last year at 93 and almost a half.
As if it’s up to me. As if it’s up to any of us.

The little ghost hanging from a tree in the cemetery
seems a little on the nose, but really,
what better place to think of those
who haunt us mostly for the good?

“The last wall of the fort is gone.”
—Dick Schmidt, retired Bee photographer, about the demolition of
The Sacramento Bee building, 21st and Q streets, Oct. 29, 2025

•••

(For Dick Schmidt and those who spent their careers committing
acts of journalism for The Sacramento Bee—and those who still do.)

•••

On the last day that the last shell-shocked shred
of exterior wall stood like an exposed wound,
overlooking the vast area where hundreds

of people once worked around the clock to
put out a daily newspaper, I watched one
of several T-Rex-sized mouths scoop up

the detritus of weeks of demolition, clattering
into the waiting mouths of hulking dump trucks.
The next day I brought you back to take photos

of the site where for four decades you made
pictures for that paper. We stood on the corner
looking into the pit of what had been

the basement, the spot where you and many
others processed color film, a formerly dark
room now rudely exposed to sunlight.

The last wall had disappeared, adding
to the rubble being collected by machines
that had no idea what had taken place here.

Acts of journalism happened, reported
and photographed and edited and laid out
and printed and delivered by people like us

who saw the work as a calling, who believed
in the importance of delivering timely, accurate
news as part of the foundation of democracy.

Now this fortress that we imagined as
permanent, unshakable, lies in ruins. Concrete
and bricks, iron and pipes, giant balls of wiring,

even the old venetian blinds heaped like
bodies in a war zone, will be hauled away,
the three-story-deep hole filled in, smoothed

over. Something new will rise in its place.
Condos, we hear, over the ashes of an admittedly
imperfect institution run by generations of fallible

humans whose names and faces have vanished,
but whose hearts, for the most part, were in
the right place—leaving those of us who remain

to wonder whether, in the long run, how much
of it mattered, if our life’s work amounted to
any more than a hill of beans in this crazy world.