Thanksgiving Spirits 2009

Before the initial first signs of decorations and ads becoming a torrential flood and the anxiety of will there be a Black Friday in this recession year darken the skies like an impending thunderstorm, here's hoping that all of us have a momnet to pause and reflect and be grateful for what we have spiritually, physically and emotionally and our ties with friends and family and after so thanking, give of our selves. A very Happy Thanksgiving from the Alaskan Poet: Please feel free to share the following over Thanksgiving:
Thanksgiving 2009
Some Thanksgivings when the nation is way ahead of Friday black,
Dollars flowing and the cash registers chimes do not lack,
So easy to surround with the Thanksgiving portrait of dollars baste,
Family and friends waiting for the never ending taste
Of the bounties of a never ending, always expanding fruitful earth,
With caloric dances and appreciation in full on birth.
Grateful is so easy when it’s a chorus of seconds and thirds,
Only weighty concern is too many leftovers from such a massive bird,
And whether there will be enough time to relax and digest,
The last mincemeat pie and still put the dishes and kitchen to rest.
Like sailing a sloop in gentle seas with the wind a beam,
So easy to give thanks for another year of the American Dream.
If perchance the green leaves of profit past have left the accounts bare,
With the frost of foreclosures and the chills of layoffs now in the air,
The TARP spread with such hope to keep away the red rain,
May have now failed to protect those amber waves of grain.
Wonders of whether the Baby Boomers may have seen the high water mark,
Lights on the city on the hill now dimming slowly into the dark?
Or is it a time to cherish more the love of families and friends
Than the baubles and trinkets left behind when the lease must end?
Or is it a time to cherish the right to worship if one should chose,
Or to cherish the right to elect, only by ballot can one lose,
Or is it time to give and share with others to bring back the village sense?
To cherish the lack of drama and of chasing of selfish dollars too intense?
We may be wobbling, woozy, and shivering in pangs of self doubt,
But if we have our families and friends, despair must prepare for the rout.
Thanksgiving is not the size of the bird but the size of the love you wish to share
If the spirit is right, if the spirit is sound, there is nothing we cannot repair.
Happy Thanksgiving, we have before and will now pass this test
Spirit and faith sound and right, we, family and friends are truly blessed.
© 11/23/2009
Michael P. Ridley

Survivors

One of the reasons why I like being a lawyer in venture capital is that you are exposed to the entrepreneurial spirit of really passionate people who will try to move heaven and earth and an investor's wallet to bring their company to fruition. TCVN every year has a survivor competition in which entrepreneurs make 30 second pitches to a panel of investors on why they should invest in their company. I met the founder of Rays a print magazine soon to also be an E-mag. How better to suggest to her on the need for a poetry column than to create the following. Will know soon whether I am going to publish and offer for sale Rhymes for the Holiday times, a collection of poems on most of the holidays and seasons occuring thoughout the year.

Journalistic Musings

There was a time far away when late at night,
With embers crackling and flames burning bright,
A muse might wander in slowly to sit before the fire
Telling tales of losses and dreams all humans seek to aspire,
Handed down from generations, sometime blind,
Not tales of scare for children but musings to open the mind,
Sad, the need to then read was not to so explore,
But to count the grain through the store house door,
Numbers ruled until the creative and abstract fled the menial fate
Human spirits to digest more thoughts, dreams, memories never to sate,
Prose ruled supreme and the muses swept to the corners dark
No place on the pages for the rhymes to embed or park
In a world of speed readers, plots and facts to compress and retain
Slowly watching the musings create images seems against the grain.
A poem is by nature an oral key to a receptive ear,
Which floods the senses, smiles or the wispy tear.
Even if you couple prose with photos no memory could produce,
Even so who better the reader’s mind and soul to seduce?
If a new magazine wishes to truly unleash the rays and be renown,
Know the campfires can still burn and a muse piece emotes hands down.
(c) October 27, 2009 Michael P. Ridley