The Dancing Wind

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 10
The moments in San Francisco seemed to swirl like a dancing wind and be gone too quickly. My dying daughter Naomi and I spent the last three months of her earthly existence in the city before she passed away in 1999. Each year since then, I have returned, staying in the same hotel, traveling the familiar boulevards, strolling in hallowed Golden Gate Park, and driving across the Golden Gate Bridge to visit the Redwood trees and Muir Beach. The Japanese Tea Garden, with its shrines, ponds, bridges and shaded paths through Zen gardens, always brings out the poet in me. While I was browsing in the gift shop, a beautiful, smiling young woman, dressed in a silk Kimono came in, joked and laughed with a young man behind the register and then left. I wrote:

You appear, blushing like spring—
Dressed in a silk kimono
Butterfly laughter, light in my heart,
You leave too quickly.

Now, my house feels empty
Wind blows rain in the window
A bird flies past
Overhead, a rainbow appears.