Today I cried
at the end of a movie,
first time I’ve cried
since the war,
and it came to me how
mommy cried during movies,
laughed too through her tears
when we boys pointed, shouted,
“Hey look!
Mommy’s crying again!”
but we couldn’t know, could we,
why she was really crying?
Maybe she was crying
because the movie
was about us, our lives,
as I cry today for my daughter
who lives in Venice now,
not the Venice of Italy or L.A.,
but along a boardwalk
of another life
on the polka dot bike
she found at an antique stall,
torn designer dress lifted by wind,
joking with jugglers, beach bums,
wasted belles of stage and screen,
her four-foot hair waving behind
like an orange wind sock,
head thrown back,
laughing crazy in the craziness.
And I’d pay anything, everything,
to sit again through that matinee,
laughing through my crying,
to watch her in a starring role.