A friend remembers, as a child,
she once tried to give a wooden nickel
to a blind girl.
She doesn’t know why she thought
it would be fun to fool her

The blind girl was indignant,
for of course she knew,
as would we all be,
as do we all

And yet it seems so often
we try to give them to each other —
smiles without light behind them,
words without truth,
touch without
reverberation, overlap of waves,
and the profound fulfillment
of harmonic tones

We’ve been taught to pretend to be fooled
but no one ever really is:
We all sense,
at least a little,
what it is we want,
what we need to give.

©Wendy Mulhern
February 12, 2015