By Gianmarc Manzione
Originally published in Verse Daily 2005.
When I tried to have a look
at the wildflowers planted
along that strip of road
in Virginia, all those hues
of pink and violet,
the three-ton truck
whining to a halt
just a small car’s length ahead
of me, how could I have known that
when I strapped the seatbelt
across my youngest daughter’s body
that morning—
my impotent protective gesture—
I assigned her a fate
she neither earned nor understood;
the shrieks
of my wife and children
jolting my eyes
toward the coming catastrophe,
announcing the cruel randomness
with which we’d been chosen
to die.
And before flattening myself
between the truck and the road,
why did the final thought I had
include no fear, no concern
for my family
nor what I’d done,
but instead recalled
the wooden green turtle
I’d roll along the beach
as a boy, and the ones who swore
they’d take it from me
unless I ate a fistful of sand;
how often I wandered back there
to recover it from the burial
they condemned it to
after I ran away, digging deep
in the quiet ground of my cowardice.