This is Plahm at his most unadorned. “My Lovely Lady” reads like something written on the drive home, still warm from the encounter it describes. The repetition of “lovely”—in “lovely ways,” “lovely day,” “Lovely Lady”—might seem almost naive, but that’s precisely the point: the speaker is not reaching for clever language but for accurate feeling. The poem’s emotional center is the hug that “send[s] me dreaming on my way home.” That single gesture contains the entire relationship: physical presence, emotional warmth, and the lingering aftereffect that transforms an ordinary drive into a reverie. The italicized closing—”Thank You, my Lovely Lady”—shifts register slightly, as if the speaker has stepped back to address her directly, formally, with the gravity that gratitude deserves. As Plahm himself notes in the comments, “Gratitude expressed simply carries more weight than elaborate praise.” This poem practices what it preaches. It’s a card, yes, but a card that knows exactly what it wants to say and says nothing more.

“My Lovely Lady” is intentionally slight—and therein lies both its charm and its limitation. The poem succeeds completely at what it sets out to do: express gratitude with warmth and simplicity. The repetition of “lovely” creates a gentle music, and the movement from day to hug to dreaming has a satisfying emotional logic. However, readers coming to this poem in isolation may find it too brief to leave a lasting impression. Its true power emerges in context—as the first panel of the diptych completed by “Cause & Effect: The Lady, the Sand, the Result,” which reveals the transformative depth beneath this surface simplicity, or as one entry in a collection that demonstrates Plahm’s range. On its own, it functions beautifully as what it is: a greeting-card poem in the best sense, a small gift of words. But it doesn’t attempt the complexity or risk of Plahm’s more ambitious work. Think of it as a perfectly ripe cherry tomato from the garden—not the harvest, but a genuine pleasure nonetheless.