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Column 461

A Story Can Change Your Life

Intro by Ted Kooser
01.19.2014

So much of what we learn about life comes from exchang­ing sto­ries, and this poem by a Cal­i­forn­ian, Peter Ever­wine, por­trays that kind of teach­ing. I love the moment where he says he doesn’t know if the sto­ry is true but it ought to be.

A Story Can Change Your Life

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.

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Disclaimer

We do not accept unsolicited submissions

We do not accept unsolicited submissions. American Life in Poetry is made possible by The Poetry Foundation (www.poetryfoundation.org), publisher of Poetry magazine. It is also supported by the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. 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. Introduction copyright © 2024 by The Poetry Foundation.