Did God Have Your Back?

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With a screech of tires and a crunch,
a Beamer rammed me off the road.

Still the engine hummed, the radio played,
the dashboard dials still glowed green,

but upside-down. My car and I had flipped!
Then, as a key turns in a lock,

the dials realigned. I laughed to learn
the turnaround was in my mind.

Not so the broken bones: I couldn't walk
for weeks. So, no, I don't believe

that God was in the crash, nor in the fact
I kept my spine intact, and my life.

But when I saw the dash turn up from under,
God was in the wonder -- and the laugh.

Image by Susan Rouse.
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A priest with a psychology degree taught me that we -- people and peoples -- retell our stories until we get them right. I've retold this one many times, always wondering what question my subconscious mind was trying to answer. I think at last I've found it.

This final draft is a return to what I wrote first. Several other drafts culminated in seven couplets that rhymed perfectly. But each end rhyme seemed to stop the story. Reading it, even I lost the thread. In a new draft, I avoided end rhyme but inserted rhymes from the earlier draft wherever they fit naturally. As internal rhymes, they add momentum and connection.

I read in Linda Pastan's poetry collection Insomnia this week some advice to poets that helped me to polish each couplet as a pearl in a necklace. - WSS