A Story Can Change Your Life

By Peter Everwine

On the morning she became a young widow,

my grandmother, startled by a sudden shadow,

looked up from her work to see a hawk turn

her prized rooster into a cloud of feathers.

That same moment, halfway around the world

in a Minnesota mine, her husband died,

buried under a ton of rockfall.

She told me this story sixty years ago.

I don’t know if it’s true but it ought to be.

She was a hard old woman, and though she knelt

on Sundays when the acolyte’s silver bell

announced the moment of Christ’s miracle,

it was the darker mysteries she lived by:

shiver-cry of an owl, black dog by the roadside,

a tapping at the door and nobody there.

The moral of the story was plain enough:

miracles become a burden and require a priest

to explain them. With signs, you only need

to keep your wits about you and place your trust

in a shadow world that lets you know hard luck

and grief are coming your way. And for that

—so the story goes—any day will do.

from Ploughshares, Winter 2012-13, Vol. 38, No. 4

Most recent book by Peter Everwine, Listening Long and Late, University of Pittsburg Press, 2013.

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