"My Angel Lady"

"Mommy, Mommy! Look at me!"
cries my nine year old from high in the tree.
She's three stories high-- climbed up there by herself.
"I found my red kite! It's on top of Grammy's house!"

She's in an old pine where dead boughs abound.
A branch breaks in her hand and she heads towards the ground.
I swear for a moment she stops in mid air--
others too, who were standing there.

She lands curled around a jagged piece of metal fence--
completely calm, neither crying nor tense.
As if a child carried in your arms
was put asleep in her bed, safe from all harm.

Forty-five feet she fell, the policeman guessed,
onto packed dry dirt in her little blue dress.
How she missed the fence, not a mark or a bruise,
he couldn't believe it, he hadn't a clue.

Still for safety's sake, the ambulance came
and they carefully moved her though she insisted no pain.
X-rays and MRI scans, the doctor was in awe--
there were no broken bones, no bruises he saw.

Her spleen was fine, as were her neck and back:
he couldn't believe the total lack
of injuries with a three story fall.
"The angel caught me," she explained it all.

"She was pretty, with long golden hair,
said it wasn't safe to beclimbing there.
"Did you see her, Mommy?" I shook my head no,
but remembered that moment when she seemed to stop so.

An angel rescued my child, caught her mid a life-threatening fall.
The doctor was speechless, couldn't explain it at all.
"She should have been broken or possibly dead--
a fall from that height," he mused, shaking his head.

"Not a mark on her, she's perfectly fine.
She's a lucky young lady-- intervention sublime."
"She's the angel lady," my daughter said.
"And she watches me from morning 'til bed."

Do I believe in angels? Not a doubt in my mind.
For one caught my daughter that summer she was nine.
I believe she still watches and guides her way,
keeping her safe from day to day.

In the Navy over in the mid-east,
on board her ship, and to say the least--
through several close calls in the two decades since--
I'll never doubt her angelic experience.







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