Will You Please Allow Me to Share Gratitude, Please?
These are true statements, by and large unsaid, to people who are important to me.
Will You Please Allow Me to Share Gratitude, Please?
Thank you for leaving the light on.
Thank you for becoming my best friend.
Thank you for being the one I'd trust when all the eyes and all the ears were paying the closest attention.
Thank you for taking it to the limit, over and over again.
Thank you for making such beautiful things out of such raw material.
Thank you for quietly making such a difference.
Thank you for your twinkling belief in what we were trying to do together.
Thank you for the myriad ways you opened my heart and my mind, and for opening yours too.
Thank you for inviting me to crawl through your window.
Thank you for your unwavering commitment to the best that life has to offer.
Thank you for the best years.
Thank you for those halcyon days and halcyon nights.
Thank you for picking this spot to paint such vivid pictures.
Thank you for challenging me so, and then championing me so.
Thank you for all you did to keep us safe.
Thank you for pouring yourself into it all, and loving it all, too.
Thank you for courageously taking on the status quo.
Thank you for being so willing to get down in the trenches to figure that shit out.
Thank you for the way you rattled the cage with your eclecticism.
Thank you for the way “sparks flew on E Street,” and our lives were never the same.
Thank you for following those silly dreams of yours.
Thank you for choosing that untraveled path, and sharing it with us all.
Thank you for embodying rock ’n’ roll, for better and for worse.
Thank you for the adventure of a lifetime.
Thank you for your belief that we can be better.
Thank you for trying so hard when it was so hard.
Thank you for the temperature at which you burned, when you did.
Thank you for your relentless commitment to helping all souls rise.
Thank you for first asking about others.
Thank you for picking me out, and picking me up.
Thank you for pouring yourself into it with such magnetic enthusiasm.
Thank you for changing my life—forever.
Thank you for the empathy, which you didn't need to show.
Thank you for wanting—and needing—to mess with the formula.
Thank you for honoring us in the ways that you did honor us.
Thank you for not resenting me.
Thank you for not moving your family away from here.
Thank you for being such a trusted, generous and open-hearted seeker.
Thank you for caring so deeply, about so much.
Thank you for being so great when you were young, and just as great when you grew up.
Thank you for the good laughs, which meant so much for so long.
Thank you for your pure and radiant heart.
Thank you for trying to do something greater than anyone may have expected.
Thank you for teaching us what you could, when you could.
Thank you for staying calm and cool and confident when I was not.
Thank you for your late-night, drink-fueled, warm-hearted truth telling.
Thank you for believing in the story as we told it, for a time.
Thank you for choosing the difficult right over the easy wrong.
Thank you for our boundless levels of friendship and connection.
Thank you for taking so much off my shoulders.
Thank you for your obsessions and your passions and your goodness.
Thank you for holding my hand when I needed it so.
Thank you for buying in to all of it, and for the wild road we traveled together.
Thank you for being so passionately and joyfully meticulous.
Thank you for being the lifeline I needed at that time.
Thank you for recognizing what’s great, and acknowledging it could be so much more, for so many.
Thank you for being the solar-superpowered reminder of grace and joy and light that you have always been.
Thank you for being so good
at so many things
that I am so bad at.
Thank you for joining me on the downbound train, over and over again.
Thank you for believing in the magic, the mystery, and the ministry, and for making sure that I always do, too.
Thank you for so fiercely protecting your dark diamond of a heart.
Thank you for saying yes in the first place.
This poem is named after Raymond Carver’s
terrific short-story collection, Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?
Here’s the companion poem, Will You Please Allow Me to Apologize, Please?
Image above from the production archive of His Bathrobe Pockets Stuffed with Notes, by Raymond Carver.
