☀ Today's Poem: "One Good Turn" David Kirby

I'm actually looking for another street when I turn into
the Via Tornabuoni, named for the Tornabuoni family
and specifically its patriarch, Giovanni, banker and patron
of the arts in Florence, where the street named after him
is located and in which I am now thinking of neither Giovanni

nor his family but of the word "Tornabuoni" itself, which means
"good turn" of the type that Wellesley College professor
Katharine Lee Bates took in 1893 when she and some other
teachers were summering in Colorado and decided to hire
a wagon and go all the way to the top of Pikes Peak, where

she found herself very tired, though "when I saw the view,"
Bates says, "I felt great joy. All the wonder of America
seemed displayed there." When Bates got back
to her hotel room, she wrote the famous opening lines
to "America the Beautiful," which was published two weeks

later and sung to tunes people already knew, notably "Auld
Lang Syne." Another meaning of "good turn"
is to do someone a favor. "I slept and dreamt that life
was joy," says Tagore. "I awoke and saw that life
was service. I acted and behold, service was joy." What does

that mean, though? Service could mean
dishing up meals at the soup kitchen or escorting the blind across busy
intersections, but what is not service as long as it brings
joy to others? One of Naomi Ginsberg's letters to her son
reads, "Get married Allen don't take drugs love, your Mother."

Allen, thanks for not listening to your mom. You did the world
a favor by just being yourself and writing those
great poems. "The best minds of my generation . . .
loned it through the streets of Idaho seeking visionary
indian angels who were visionary indian angels . . . . Dreams!

adorations! illuminations! religions! the whole boatload
of sensitive bullshit! . . . Real holy laughter in the river!
They saw it all." Wait, I'm lost again. Where's
the street I'm looking for? Yet here is the church of Santa Maria Novella
and its Tornabuoni chapel with Ghirlandaio's grand cycle

of frescos depicting the life of Mary. In one fresco
she's marrying Joseph as the other suitors break their sticks and raise
their hands in anger, and no wonder:
how dishy she is! "She is of an attractive
and ideal height," said Lorenzo de Medici, "the tone

of her skin fresh but not glowing, her demeanor grave
but not proud, sweet, and pleasing, without frivolity or fear."
Then Jesus is born. He's a baby. He doesn't know anything,
yet he knows everything: that we die, that the world
is as beautiful as ever even when we're no longer in it.

Even now you see women as lovely as Mary in the streets
of Florence and babies as wise as Jesus—in any street,
really, in any town. The Tornabuoni Chapel is open every day.
Anybody can walk in and look at these works of heart-stopping beauty.
You don't even have to believe in God, just miracles.