April 1 is April Fool's Day. It's also the first day of National Poetry Month. Therefore, I post the following poem, which talks not about fools but about:
Foolish Money
Foolish money is not the money you spent unwisely
on that pair of shoes that don’t match anything.
It’s not the ten-dollar bill you so foolishly dropped
in the garbage bin when you threw away the receipt
in your hand as you left the store.
It’s not the quarter you bent over to pick up in the gutter,
hoping no one was watching.
It’s not the money you spent for a trip to Paris with your boyfriend,
who left you there to make your broken-hearted
way home, determined never to be such a fool again.
Foolish money is not the ten thousand dollars
that built a pond that never filled.
And it certainly is not the money that bought
the degree in English you “never used.”
Foolish money is the money
my mother gave each of her children
after her annual Open House,
at which she sold the bins and tins and metal trays,
children’s chairs, china cups and saucers,
wooden boxes, Japanese screens
she had been painting for months.
“This is foolish money,” she would say.
“Don’t spend it on anything important,”
by which I learned
that generosity is never foolish.
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