A Thanksgiving Wish genre: Happy Remembrances & Rhyme-N-Reason & Snapshot Thoughts

I'm not a big fan of the way we celebrate holidays...especially the focus that is placed on the commercial aspects. In my own way, I have made them all about a celebration of people I have known who are no longer here. Thanksgiving for me is about my friend Mike who died on October 27, 1995. The following poem is from a card Mike made before he died that he asked me to send out on Thanksgiving if it turned out that he didn't live that long.

Maybe that's when I began to make holidays about the dead. In making cards to send out even after he died, Mike kept giving of himself even though he was no longer with us. His insightful gesture captured the essence of remembrance...found in our ability to give and receive even though we no longer share the same existence...but all the while sharing something far more valuable...our humanity. I am thankful to have known Mike and so many others who have left this world and I celebrate them all each day.

Fountain in Auckland - 2005

A man searched for a gift to give
To a troubled, divided and despairing world
A token to radiate his unfailing hope
For better things, for better times;
A gift to becalm the tormented soul
Of a world suffering from its own inhumanities
A gesture, perhaps, to give a voice
To his fervent yearning for a mood of peace;
Something to express what he could not say:
That universal love for man must survive.
Yet he found no gift, no token, no gesture -
Nothing in the shops, nothing in the faces,
And wept at the futility of his search,
Not knowing he had it - the gift of himself.

Daniel DiRito | November 21, 2007 | 8:19 PM
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