Avoid Adapting Other People's Negative Views


                          after Epictetus
                      

To gaze upon the fatal
without commiserating gloom:
 
what every friend should be—
not one who rends her coat of doom
 
nor one who lets her ankle rankle
nor her dogged love to the hounds.          
 
Be the cat in catastrophe
who survives eight more dives.
 
Though in the clutch of damage
a dame must age,
 
in the crazy-quilt of guilt
it was never your fault.
 
In the company of morose
always pull out the rose.

Copyright © 2013 by Sharon Dolin. Used with permission of the author. This poem appeared in Poem-A-Day on November 6, 2013. Browse the Poem-A-Day archive.