Engagement Poem

For our engagement, Josh wrote me three beautiful poems. Here is the last of the three, my personal favorite! I am a lucky girl :)

a notion has long been carried

out from the corridors of churches

that ‘luck’ is a pagan phrase

and should always be

substituted by ‘blessing’

presumably because the former

seems absent of a source

plus its dubious ties to blackjack

cannot have helped its case

‘blessing’, however, a splendid upgrade,

assumes a giver, and is scarcely spoken

among cards unless a player sneezes

but today

as i was trying my damnedest

to articulate my love for you

which often renders me stupid

(like a poet before the sublime

staring into its essence and

feebly trying to lift a pen

weighted down by every insufficient word)

i wanted to use ‘lucky’, not ‘blessing’

because the confession implicit in my love

is that i am an undeserving man

as responsible for my lot as the

janitor who happened to grab

the winning ticket after sleeping

through his shift

and when i think of ‘blessing’

however errant this may be

i cannot help but see

visions of pious men

ascending to heavenly mansions

procured by unwavering virtue

no, i think ‘luck’ is more

to the truth in this case

for i stumbled across you

one day in a class i should

have taken six semesters earlier

and then again the next day

in another class i should have

taken six semesters earlier

when seeing you

only once a week would certainly

have been the impetus i needed

to roll the dice

after all, luck is the choicest synonym

for Grace-- that pure unmerited favor

which inexplicably lands upon the sons of men

who can do nothing but receive and respond in awe

and do their best not to reduce it to ‘blessing’

so you will understand then

why, when i think about the

most fortunate thing

that has ever happened to me--

realizing that God formed

us for each other--

i call it luck,

and know that Grace was in the second thought.