This poem was all over the place this morning.

At first, as often happens, I was working with sound and form more than content, not really listening or pushing the poem a certain way.

This was that first effort:

I want you to have a 
morning
of great content and 
sunlight
passing through like
passengers
on trains, suitcases
on wheels and portfolios
crammed
in white-knuckle hands,
bright
rings of gold bells cut along 
pattern lines and high
minded sewn into pillows
plush with secrets known
only 
to prize-fighters like you

I looked at that for a while and abandoned it. I like some of the sounds there and tying the word “ring” with “prize-fighters”, but otherwise it was missing the mark.

The first line started on the back of my sudoku this morning. I was thinking about what I might want for my kids someday, something full of contentment and meaning, a quiet morning perhaps.

It struck me at some point that maybe I wanted them to have a morning at a diner with friends which I am fortunate to have each week. With that in mind I wrote this version of the poem:

I want you to have 
a morning of 
great content
with endless coffee 
and sunlit wide 
windows kissing 
the waking world,
where everyone knows
your order and can
guess your name from
the way you smile and
grin, with a paper
napkin on your lap
and friendships
so familiar they’ll
scoot over in the 
booth to shadow
your face as that 
kiss pulls away,
and you’ll become
aware that these
are only windows
here between 
the days that
I too wished would
never end 

I shared this with my poetry mentor and though she offered suggestions, I also abandoned this poem as too meandering and lacking the feeling of an actual diner breakfast with friends.

So I wrote another poem, the poem above. This one does a better job to capture the feeling of such a breakfast, hinting at the things that I know I’ll remember years from now when circumstances prevent me from having these moments in my weeks.

I have been going to regular breakfasts with friends for a long time now. We have a diner we mostly use with a booth that is often set before we get there when it opens at six am.

This is absolutely something I hope that my children have in their lives, something regular and comfortable and with lifelong friends that span decades.

We don’t all get this though, do we, and it might not be a diner breakfast. It might be game night or phone calls or some regular thing that we realize we’ve been doing with others for a long time.

Perhaps it isn’t something you can orchestrate, but with intention and will, it is something that I hope all of us can find, whether with one friend or many, week to week, month to month or year to year.

Or even just once, to know that you are among friends and that laughter and joy are, at least for a moment, endless.

Ok, WordPress AI Image Generator, what do you have for us today?

Very much on the nose. The meal looks like it is sitting on a roaster pan.

I worked with the featured image here until the white of the background blended with the white of the page background. I love the draping black strings here and the shadows they form. Perhaps not as directly reflective of this poem, but for me much more appropriate.