Poem 17 ± World AIDS Day 2017

Marjorie Moorhead
Starlight in My Pocket

A song I’m learning says, “Catch a falling star.”
It says, “put in your pocket.” A clue:
keep it there for when needed, when things look blue.

Keep it, for when troubles start growing,
creating a fright.
The song says, “and they just might.”

Troubles are easy to forget without trying,
the lyrics say: all that’s needed, “a pocketful of starlight.”
Who’s got starlight?! Will it help when I’m crying?

I keep a rock from the beach in my pocket.
Smooth, to rub. Silky soft surface.
Dissipates worry. Works; don’t knock it.

Smoothed by the sea, not a scratch or scar.
Is it my “starlight”? Gives comfort;
like music, while driving the car.

Trees whizz by. I sing out, at the top of my lungs
releasing anxiety; things that have stung.
Not kept in reserve “for a rainy day,”

this orb, too, in my pocket, helps worries fall away.
An everyday tool. With me while I cruise,
in car, or on foot, singing the blues.

Editor’s Note: Here’s a link to the 1957 hit recording by Perry Como.

Marjorie Moorhead is a mother, sister, wife, daughter, and AIDS Survivor living in New England, navigating the positive life since the late 1980s. It has been quite a transformation. Marjorie’s poetry will appear in the Opening Windows Fourth Friday Poets collection published by Hobblebush Press in 2018. Her poem “Wandering the Anthropocene” was chosen for inclusion in a 2018 book of climate poems that will benefit the Environmental Justice Foundation.