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. 

Poem copyright ©2012 by Peter Everwine, whose most recent book of poems is Listening Long and Late, University of Pittsburg Press, 2013. Poem reprinted from Ploughshares, Winter 2012-13, Vol. 38, No. 4, by permission of Peter Everwine and the publisher.