Gratitude of a Different Ilk

Betsy Joseph

November 21, 2021

I cannot speak to what others might do

if pushed unexpectedly by another to the floor

in an apparent life-saving gesture.

When such a bizarre event happened to me,

I sought to regain the breath that had whooshed

from my lungs while wriggling my body

from beneath the weight that held me in place.

Only later did I offer thanks for his intent to protect me

from a danger that was not real.

The fear on his part was genuine.

The setting was an all-faculty lunch with staff

loosely formed in lines much resembling

grade school students waiting turns

at the water fountain after recess.

Then it happened.

A large, empty stainless steel serving dish

slipped from unsteady hands and crashed loudly,

striking the brown tile floor below.

A panicked voice directly behind me screamed “Incoming!”

and all I recall is being upright one moment, flattened the next

with 180 pounds pressing down on me.

It took two colleagues to pull Curt’s body off mine

and another to attend to me in the large space

that had grown quickly and eerily silent. 

No one could have predicted this reverberating crash 

would trigger such response in a fellow professor   

who thirty-one years before, at age twenty,

had entered the war in ‘Nam during the infamous Tet Offensive. 

Instinct has a powerful reflex as I learned that afternoon.

The aftermath of those moments remains both sharp and blurred.

Once checked for injuries, I turned to search for Curt—

but he had escaped the tumult, shaken and embarrassed.

It was a week before I found him in his office.

As he began to apologize for scaring and bruising me,

I reached my hand toward his, strange gratitude welling inside.

An actor in an unrehearsed drama that otherwise benign day,

Curt was attempting to save my life in a setting 

and instant that presented a clear and present danger 

in a mind still racked by trauma and nightmare.

Betsy Joseph enjoyed a long tenure of college teaching with DCCCD. Her poems have appeared in a number of journals and her poetry collection, Only So Many Autumns, was published by Lamar University Literary Press in 2019. Recently she and her husband, photographer Bruce Jordan, published their book Benches, which pairs her haiku with his black and white photography.