I
We could so easily not exist,
the one in a million sperm
penetrating one
of the countless eggs
defining our DNA.
We know little of our history.
What happened
in Neanderthal days,
the Middle Ages, myriad wars,
plagues, fires, crashes?
Sometimes we know of
close encounters of a nearer time,
family stories, tales of
what might have been.
My grandmother,
engaged to a German boy
she met at an Arkansas college.
One night on the new-fangled phone,
being wooed, a gun blast,
shattered the night air,
causing an unforgettable
silence on the other end
of that messenger of death.
The backwoods insanity
of unrequited love caused
a would-be grandfather,
a spurned beau to gun down
that foreign lover,
caused my grandmother
to droop like a plucked flower,
cause me to never be born,
never to tell anyone
of that dark night
in that Arkansas Hell.
II
Years later, at a California beach,
the sea grabbed that same grandmother,
almost ended me again.
Near the fierce undertow, deathly afraid of water
(our Mother told us later),
she slipped off her shoes,
stood a few feet from the shore.
Crowded beach, hundreds of bathers,
shading their eyes from the blinding sun.
The riptide pulled, grinned evilly
under the water, dragged
her down and out,
her wraith-like body sank.
An Olympic swimmer saw the disappearance,
plunged, grabbed a foot. A moment
longer she would have slipped away.
Again, a tale I would never tell.
Originally Published in Monterey Poetry Review