Margaret Morley

Maggie (Margaret) Morley (1934-2026) was a poet and a Scrabble expert.    Her parents, Luther and Ailene Meyer, also loved Scrabble; her mother was a librarian for a time, and Luther was a reporter for several Bay Area papers.  Maggie’s poetry was widely published in California poetry journals, and she was the editor of Poetalk, of the Bay Area Poets Coalition, from 1998 to 2010.    She was the youngest of three children, with James having passed in 2000, and Alan (also a poet and Scrabble player) having just had his 100th birthday.    She grew up during the depression and WWII, spending much of her youth in Northern California.  Maggie attended University of the Pacific where she studied piano, before moving to UC Berkeley, where she studied English and worked on the school paper, the Daily Californian.  Also on the staff of the paper at that time was Joan Didion.  Maggie narrowly lost to Joan in a Vogue writing contest, which catapulted Joan’s career; Maggie stayed in Berkeley, where she lived with her husband, Morgan Morley.  They were both students at UCB when she had her only child, Michael Morley.    Maggie lived in Berkeley and worked for many years as the librarian at Lawrence Berkeley Labs.  She is noted in the Clifford Stoll book, “The Cuckoo’s Egg,” as well as appearing in the NOVA documentary, "The KGB, the Computer, and Me", as providing helpful clues in solving that spy hacking mystery.  After retiring, she traveled the world, often with her brother, to attend many Scrabble championships.  She ultimately moved to Marin County, where she enthusiastically initiated a poetry group for her retirement community and mentored several beginner Scrabble players.  

Maggie was heartbroken when her son, Michael, passed away in 2021.   In addition to her brother Alan, she is survived by two nieces, Martha Iancu and Janet Amaral, nephews David Meyer, Matt Meyer, and Paul Meyer-Strom; their spouses Trandifir Iancu, Walter Amaral, Jane Hart, Melissa Meyer, and Kim Gordon Burgess; five grand nieces, two grand nephews, three great nieces/nephews; and finally, her valued friend, Andrew Werner.  She will be greatly missed by everyone whose lives she touched.    Two of her poems:  On the Death of a Goldfish named Ralph Ann  I was never good at telling the gender of goldfish.  So, I gave you two names. It was always a delight to watch you purge the gravel in the bottom of your tank.  You’d suck the pebbles for what was left of last night’s dinner.  Why Ralph spat the green ones at the feet of the plaster mermaid is a puzzle I will always cherish.  And why Ann took the red ones to the top of the tank and let them drop like sparrows past the guppies—who always took the look of mutes—is beyond me.  I’m sure they envied  your beautiful tail when it rippled past them like silken plumes churned in undertow. You were stiff as plastic when I found you at the foot of the stairs.  Some said the cat  pulled you from your retreat.  But I always knew you watched me close down the house at night and wondered where I went, and that one night  you’d jumped from your tank, trying to follow me.  Maggie Morley   The Wild Garden  Because I love the weed’s persistence, its mighty green, and how it will sometimes flower and frill, despite itself, and how these flourishes are miraculous…  Because I cultivate the wild blackberry bush, regularly threading rampant tendrils back and forth through the wires of the homely cyclone fence, celebrating the curtain of leaves it is becoming…  Because I leave the holes in the old fence unmended, inviting in the hungry…  Because I leave the blossoms for deer who roam the garden under moonlight, their ragged coats turning silver…  Because I let the pumpkin’s curling stems hold close to the sweet loam and the tomatoes go un-staked, their blushing cheeks pressed low to earth in the position of worship…  I cultivate myself every day, bowing down not to pluck, but to praise. Because I cannot bear to distinguish between flower and weed, myself having felt so often neither beautiful nor chosen, but want to live, urgently, as the weed does.  (Maggie Morley, 2014)