My Aunt’s Bonnet

A smile for you this morning. 🙂

My Aunt’s Bonnet
by Edgar A. Guest

They say life’s simple — but I don’t know.
Who can tell where a word will go?
Or how many hopes will rise and fall
with the weakest brick in the cellar wall?

Or how many hearts will break and bleed
as the result of one careless deed?
Why, my old Aunt’s bonnet caused more dismay
than a thousand suns could shine away.

She wore it high through her top-knot pinned,
a perfect kite for a heavy wind,
but the hat would stick, though a gale might blow,
if she found the place where the pins should go.

One Sunday morning she dressed in haste,
she hadn’t a minute which she could waste,
she’d be late for church. Now the tale begins:
she didn’t take care with those bonnet pins.

Oh the wind it howled, and the wind it blew
and away from her head that bonnet flew!
It swirled up straight to select its course,
first brushing the ears of the deacon’s horse.

With a leap he scampered away in fright
and scattered the children, left and right.
A stranger grabbed for the horse’s head,
but stumbled and fractured his own instead.

After the bonnet a small boy ran,
knocked over a woman and tripped a man.
The deacon’s daughter married the chap
who rescued her from the swaying trap.

And she lived to regret it later on;
In all that town there abided none
whose life wasn’t changed on that dreadful day
when my old Aunt’s bonnet was blown away.

Some were crippled and some went mad,
some turned saintly and some turned bad;
birth and marriage and death and pain
were all swept down in that bonnet’s train.

Wives quarreled with husbands! I can’t relate
the endless tricks which were played by fate.
There are folk today who had not been born
had my Aunt stayed home on that Sunday morn.

From the book, Collected Verse of Edgar A. Guest,
©1934 by the Reilly & Lee Co