The Ways of Fate by Michael Ceraolo

Here is the first poem of a new sequence, Excuse My Dust, which will be poems in the persona of Wallace Reid, the silent-movie actor, the sequence to be a sort of autobiography.  Each poem will have the title of one of his movies and will have the same number of lines as the running time of the movie (as best as the running time can be determined in some cases). 

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The Ways of Fate

Dad was a playwright and actor,

and Mother often acted in his plays as well,

so I was "born in a trunk" in St. Louis

Mother was from there and still had family there,

so I sometimes stayed with my grandmother

while Mother and Dad were on the road

During one stay while I was five,

May 27, 1896 to be precise,

a powerful tornado hit the city,

killing a few hundred, leaving several thousand homeless

Fate spared Grandmother and me

What would I do with the life that was saved?