Meaningful

Lori Levy

We talk about a meaningful life
as if there’s a recipe for living and we must not forget
to add the essential ingredient: meaningful.
Now that my brother has retired,
he wants to feel he’s contributing to the world—
his definition of meaningful—
so he teaches English to a refugee from the Congo,
volunteers to visit with hospice patients, attends gatherings
of groups who want peace in the Middle East.

I begin to wonder:
Can meaningful be less grand?
More the size of our everyday acts at home,
as when he barbecues the chicken
his wife has marinated,
loads the dishwasher, mows the lawn.
Does it count—when it comes to meaningful—
that he sails with friends on Lake Champlain
in the summer, goes backcountry skiing in the winter?
That he gives us a bottle of the maple syrup he makes
every winter from the maples in his yard?

Maybe meaningful is ingrained in the wooden spoons
he carves, the stories and essays he writes.
The delight in his eyes when he holds his first-born grandchild.
The way he and his wife give a speech together
at their daughter’s wedding. The jokes, the loving humor.

Meaningful? All I know is the ease we all feel
in his presence, the calming softness he emanates.
The fact that my adult kids call him an angel.

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Lori Levy
Lori Levy's poems have been published in Paterson Literary Review, Passager Journal, Poetry East, Mom Egg Review, ONE ART, and numerous other online and print literary journals and anthologies. Two of her chapbooks were published in 2023: "What Do You Mean When You Say Green? and Other Poems of Color" (Kelsay Books) and "Feet in L.A., But My Womb Lives in Jerusalem, My Breath in Vermont" (Ben Yehuda Press). Levy lives with her husband in Los Angeles.