It’s hard to be merry when your mother is dying,
especially a mother whose name is Merry.
So we two wives saw the Bard’s morality play,
“The Merry Wives of Windsor.”
We watched the women deliver their jaunty lines
as they tricked a cuckoldly knave.
They did “prove themselves merry, and yet honest too,”
just as Shakespeare promised.
Their gig was up at Herne’s Oak, a tree that did fall
but not that night. The play ends:
“Heaven give us many, many more merry days.”
Many more Merry days, indeed.