**it Happens

Sounds better in French.

Life brings disappointments,                                
understatement summed
up with crude two-word phrase
about what tends to happen
(on the farm where we raised goats,
we shoveled piles of it, and did not
try to dress it up with softer words).
But there's a scale, with different levels of despair
at what life sends, how badly are our teeth
kicked in, how quickly rug
is pulled out from beneath our feet.
Finding long-lost CD of Bocelli and
anticipation of his serenade to so suitably
start off the day...and opening
the case to find, not emptiness, but
twanger (who has merits of her own,
but hardly met my expectation) rates,
I'd say, far down, the low end
of the spectrum. As does plan to run,
while nature superceded with a plan to rain.
Small disappointments, met with grace,
bode well because the big ones always come
and when they do, we're more prepared,
in some weird cosmic way, to meet them
at the door, and look them squarely in the face.


(c) Ellen Gillette, 2013