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 trick a knave and a cuckold.
They did “prove themselves merry, and yet honest too,”
just as Shakespeare promised.
Their gig is up once they reach 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.