How We Laugh

Ghosts breathe in me through sleeping hours
Clutching clean dry hands
They float me into brightly-lit shops with my children
Reduced, made younger
Frivolously, we search for meaningful cups and sparkly shoes
Pretty dresses with brilliant flowers
Fine cotton dress shirts with pink and grey stripes
Donning the fresh trappings, we venture into other forbidden places
Restaurants and concert halls and crowded after-parties
Where we eat and drink and listen and dance and sing along and tell tall tales
Eyes aglow from the wondrous assault to our senses

And we laugh
Oh how we laugh!
Great rivers of joy recklessly flood our faces
How we laughed!

We laugh still
Can anyone hear?
Sure there has been stoppage, alarm, altered wages and stages
Illness, and death minus the ritual of funeral
Conspiracy, confusion, misinformation
But transformation! So available
beyond haunting apparitions and lurking nostalgia
A better me, a better you
In here, out there

Website photo: My son & I finding things to laugh about.