The Arranger
by Carl Slater


Who does arrange these things anyway?
Is it the great novelist in the sky,
He, or she, who has been writing stories
Since time began,
He, who in a contest with the devil,
Arranged for every plague, pestilence, loss, and misery
He could think of
To be visited upon Job
To test his faith,

Or is he a more playful novelist,
One who enjoys putting his characters
In difficult situations,
Not to test their faith,
Not to see how they will cope,
But just to see what they will do,
Maybe it all happens just for his entertainment.

It is certainly not that he is looking
For another best seller,
He has written plenty of those,
Year after year for eons,
And it is not that he enjoys the writing itself,
He tired of that long ago,
And turned the writing
Over to the writers of the world,

But he does like to keep his hand in,
In the business of storytelling,
And to remind those arrogant writers of fiction,
That he can still spin a far better story,
Putting together people and circumstances
In ways that would raise cries
Of "implausibility," "far-fetched," "foul"
Towards a writer of mere fiction.






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