Poem 2: Chance Meetings

 

CHANCE MEETINGS

By Stevie Dufyn, 2022.

 

X marks a point where two lives cross.
A pause on long journeys, an exchange of spirit and soul
‘I have come from afar. I greet you’, each affirms.
Will they cross by? or travel together?


Roads divide, with choices to be made,
Crossroads, with destinations unknown,. demanding decision.
Choices with consequences, controlling our future
Blocking alternative might-have-been lives.


Such an X marks the day my father and mother met,
A Bomber Command boy invited for Sunday lunch.
Five children owe their being to this moment,
Who otherwise would never have existed.


So the person called ‘I’ was born by luck
By fortune good or bad, Cards were dealt
Which need skillful playing. The might-have-been ‘I’
Would have held and played a quite different hand.


So who am ‘I’? A body, a brain, a bundle of thoughts,
A chaos of feelings, emotions, ambitions, loyalties.
The moral path is narrow and tortuous. A giver? a just contributor?
Or a taker, a greedy self-serving consumer.


A voice inside says ‘I’, ‘me’, ‘my’, ‘mine’.
It imagines that we exist for ourselves, for our own purposes.
It is a fragile picture, a changeable, breakable image.
When ‘I’ becomes ‘we’, relationship is born and community begins.


‘I’ was taught to obey, but failed that lesson. I questioned.
‘I’ was required to accept, another fail. I argued.
‘I’ publicly dispatched Santa at 4, enraging local parents.
‘I’ discovered that goldfish die in polluted water.


‘I’ was curious, an investigator, a questioner, an experimenter.
A reader, a watcher and a listener. Memories are as if yesterday.
Even in my own way, a performer, story-teller and musician.
These fragments loosely jostle. And then I went to school.


School has left few memories And certainly no good ones.
Thirty silent children in rows, embarrassed even to laugh.
Shamed, controlled by sarcasm, bullying and shouting.
But it failed again. I became subversive, a rebel.


We recited the catechism. ‘I believe in God…’, the Christian myth,
Jesus and his implausible parentage, descent into hell, resurrection and ascension.
I was not Christened, so not ‘a child of God’, not ‘an inheritor of the kingdom’,
An outsider, thoughtlessly created, now proudly subverted..


‘I’, written off by school, got a First and PhD at university
Manchester but I might have gone to Sheffield,
Meeting my wife from Bradford who might have gone to Leeds.
‘Might-have-been I’ might have met a different might-have-been wife.


Different lives, with different consequences.
Lives cross, touch, feed, guide, learn and teach.
We are the prisoner of choices, luck, and live with the consequences
Responsible for the lasting relationships that emerge.


Real ‘we’ had no surviving children, and hence no grandchildren.
‘Might-have-been-we’ might have a family, and grandchildren,
Who might have kept in touch. How hard human life can be.
As we live with what is, not what ‘might-have-been’.


Now in old age, some might-have-beens are friends,
And ‘might-become’ take the stage.
New choices emerge, children, grandchildren, sisters and brothers
By choice not birth, as friendships widen, deepen.


X records a treasure, not measured in gold or stones
But in a healthy world with a sane future.
And X is a vote, not for power, grift and greed,
But for selfless public service, with moral vision.


Who am ‘I’ when faculties are dimmed?
Will I have a sense of who I am, and why I am?
Will the fragments of self and understanding cohere?
Will ‘I’, me, my self, my soul, still be whole?

By Stevie Dufyn (Stephen Bigger), November 2022.