I sit here late night/early morning and a day late again but running as fast as I can to keep up with the poem a day challenge of April’s poetry month observation.  The challenge today is to write a poem about fortune, be it good luck, bad, just some sort of derivation.  I suppose this should not be such a challenging and daunting task.  There is certainly enough material to work with, right?  Today alone, the girls and I watched Fiddler On the Roof and must have heard malzatov ring out a thousand times and talked about the good fortune of spending time with the ones we love most and topped that off with a dinner at a Chinese buffet reading fortune cookies followed by a movie detailing the mixed blessings of good and bad luck endured by the crew of the starship Enterprise.  So, why do I have a flurry of images and no real plan?

At the Temple of Good Fortune
by Michael Romani

Standing like Buddhist monks in our contemplation
Looking out onto the distant twinkle of constellations
Opening our fortune cookies to seek our destinies
Small aphorisms as trite and shiny as half copper pennies
Laughing with the bravado of shlemozzle, schlimazel
As we recalled the schmears on this morning's bagels

Those bagels that we ate before we watched the play
The play that lasted for almost half a day
That told the story of the fortunes of a Fiddler on the Roof
And which provided in its history a sort of half laughing proof
That in all of recorded life filled with love and strife
All of it is lived by mortal men who wish mainly for a good life

The solution is in the problem if only looked at differently
My eldest daughter hinted and grinned playfully, defiantly
If only we might all work toward random act of kindness
Instead of being caught up in unforgiving blindness
The humanity in us all might serve like mankind's life vest
And isn't that small enough a thing to devote and invest

Then at last we might release ourselves from cages of the past
She smiles so sweetly looking on her cookie's sacred lot cast
That said on that tiny paper that if she pursued her quest
She would eventually pull that brass ring and gain her best
So ambiguously worded and yet arguably filled with wisdom
Tiny irritating grains that force scars into pearls for the kingdom

(c) April 7, 2017 Michael Romani