Who would you choose?

It's funny how things just come to you in the shower, isn't it? The last 2 lines of a poem came to my mind this morning and this poem is what came out of it.

Who would you choose?

The water was rising, the rain pouring down
as I stood on the edge of bank
time for just one, time to choose from those two
before both of them sank

My mother was clinging there, grasping a branch
as the powerful currents flowed past.
My girl-friend, the other, ten metres away
where she, to a tree stump, held fast

I looked at the flow of the melt-water stream
and looked from my girl-friend to mother;
how could I choose between two that I love?
yet time but to choose one or other.

How could I measure the worth of two people
who meant all the world to me?
and wade with a rope to save just the one
deciding the other’s destiny?

And so there I stood, unable to choose
out of love for these ones, so dear.
Both looked on with pleading, each yearning their life,
with inescapably palpable fear.

I couldn’t decide, make this ultimate choice
and give up the one for the other.
In choosing the one, the other would die.
Could I give up my girl-friend or mother?

Yet this story’s no ‘one-off’, it’s happened before
when one could be saved, but who?
Between sinner and son, the father chose one
when God turned to man, and chose you.

TheWeeScottie

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weird is just your own personal brand of normal