This poet is very glad that not everyone can compose an accurate Elizabethan sonnet within fifteen minutes ~ and on the subject ~ of request (as well as including a phrase of choice). This fact lets her hold up her head around all the folks who excel at things at which she herself would have not a porcupine’s prayer of success…

*****

Recorded Reading (2:48): https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/9l1yz78407fhz9gro0dbc/How-Do-You-Do.mp3?rlkey=qo29xnj0oit3vu22rfhjagiw4&st=lvempido&dl=0

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How Do You Do?

All around me there are people
Doing things that I can’t do
There’s astonishment in each
Direction I might choose to view

The railroad man’s ability,
To me a wondrous gift,
Repair our nation’s rails
With tools that I can’t even lift

The bank cashier who works with numbers
Under pressure day and night
When simple math is something
This mind’s always had to fight

The nurs’ry worker, patient
With children hour by hour
Beginning, with the seedlings,
To bring the adult plants to flow’r

The first responders, in first person
Drastic’ly aware
Of daily situations only
One of which would be my nightmare

I’d be a stagg’ring, staring wreck
Nurse, for twelve hours trying to please
Employers, doctors, patients
And their freaked out families

And though I’ve been musician
I think my patients I would kill
If I required these same fingers
To match a surgeon’s steady skill

Public greeters, front and center
Every yahoo right before
Beaming out a smile all day
To everybody on the floor,

An unsuspected number
Of whom forget to say
It was the only smile
They got from anyone that day

Our governors and judges go
To their rest every single night
Wishing they could surely know
The decisions that day were right

Which will affect not just themselves,
Not only family,
But everybody everywhere
From where they stand whom they can see

The architect can build a building
In one hundred years won’t fall
While I have trouble stacking
Cardboard boxes ‘gainst a wall

Those truckers who can turn a trailer
Yards and more yards long?
I try to turn a minivan
And still manage to get it wrong!

Policepersons who actually
Do their best to trouble see
Before it eventually
Decides it should visit me…

In every occupation,
It seems, impossibilities
Present themselves which shortly would
Have me upon despairing knees

All around me operators
Seem to have their gigs down pat,
While I stand back in wonder
Asking, “How the heck do you do that?!?”

*****

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This poet presently lives at a fraction of her nation’s poverty level.

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