Prayer flags

I left the store with a Kleenex and Snickers bar.
The girl behind the counter said,
"Enjoy your afternoon" I said, "you too"
and walking home I asked myself
what I could do, if anything,
too reel that pleasure in.
Perhaps in stores across the city
people were telling one another
as we had done just now
to fill the afternoons with happiness
and as those wishes caught the wind
like prayer-flags in the Himalayas
were there enough of them
to change the days for some of us? Who knows?

—David Chandler, Quadrant, March 2008, p. 107.