PTSW: All Things Work Together

My Daddy and Mother with their first six children about 1955. L-R on couch: Debi, Mother, (baby), Daddy, Carol, Me. Standing Janice holding baby Beth and Joan. David was not born till 1958.

My Daddy would have turned 103 day before yesterday. I have been plagued all my life by contemplation of the vicissitudes of life. Chaos theory; Lord only knows what changes occur in the history of the world because a butterfly flaps his wings. My youngest never knew my Daddy, even though I see him in her always. How he would have spoiled her given the opportunity.

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 All Things Work Together: 

A Daughter is Born
to Lillian

If Daddy hadn't died, would this poem be?

-- A bull through china, the ugly thought crashes --

Would his longer thread in the mesh

of years obstruct by chance

that one in a trillion accident of love,

coincidence of sperm and egg?

-- The breakage, unmanaged, scatters and

scratches! --

Could his garden bugs these years have fed

a nest of wrens to send a wanderer to my window?

And letting a living poem sleep,

might I have written, instead, the wren?

-- Bull-headed I sweep the debris --

If Daddy lives, must the poem vanish?

I weep for my Daddy;

I mourn the wren that never was;

And welcome you to my heart, my present poem.

- by Terrell Shaw