Fortune Cookies
/We just returned from a remarkable conversation, my White House Fellows classmates and I, with President and Mrs Carter. (This would qualify as not a typical Friday!) Somehow the last lines of this poem speak of how those two remarkable people, now in their 80's, have served the world since leaving office. And the words of the two fortune cookies in the poem also serve as encouragement to every one of us in our own life. To move forward with energy and hope.
Fortune Cookie
Fortune cookies
I tried to write to you
an e-mail, fit
to the technology.
It crumpled into
islands of jottings,
on a blue lined page,
begging to be linked
into some archipelago
of questions and musings.
Our half-finished
conversation, like the
uneaten cookies
still on the table
beside the coffee cups
and my half written notes,
waited when I returned.
My cat opened the
bag of cookies
in the kitchen
and ate them
in my absence,
but she never touched
the ones we left behind,
intent on conversation
and running for our
separate planes.
Nor did she move
the still unopened
fortune cookies.
So curious,
I opened both of them
when I returned.
One said that you have
everything you need;
the other, you are
embarking on a great adventure.
Pg 428 Simple Gifts by Judy Brown