Every two hours I eat. It doesn’t take me long to eat what little I can manage right now. Accounting for preparing to eat, eating, and thinking about what I ate and how I’m feeling about it, that leaves about 100 minutes between meals for contemplation.

I just had my 10 o’clock (applesauce, graham cracker, almond milk). It felt good. I started feeling grateful. The mind begins to make less rudimentary connections once you are no longer starving. I started thinking about gratitude, and a poem came to me immediately. A poem written by a friend, a very fine poet, who was crushed by the weight of the world just over seven years ago – prompting a mutual friend to eventually write this. I’d been thinking about her these days, because J and I just celebrated our anniversary. She danced at our wedding.

Here is her poem. Thank you, Sarah. I miss you.

For the Fog Horn When There Is No Fog
Sarah Hannah
(as published on Verse Daily)

Still sounding in full sun past the jetty,
While low tide waves lap trinkets at your feet,

And you skip across dried trident trails,
Fling weeds, and do not think of worry.

For the horn that blares although you call it stubborn,
In error, out of place. For the ridicule endured,

And the continuance.
You can count out your beloved—crustaceans—

Winking in spray, still breathing in the wake,
Beneath the hooking flights of gulls,

Through the horn’s threnody.
Count them now among the moving. They are.

For weathervane and almanac, ephemeris and augur,
Blameless seer versed in bones, entrails, landed shells.

For everything that tries to counsel vigilance:
The surly sullen bell, before the going,

The warning that reiterates across
The water: there might someday be fog

(They will be lost), there might very well
Be fog someday, and you will have nothing

But remembrance, and you will have to learn
To be grateful.