Happenstance

A September Prose Poem (redux)

Happy Labor Day Weekend! I generated this poem in a Bending Genres class several years ago. I hope you like it, and will consider a free subscription.

Happenstance

Was there intention in Virgo’s stars? Prophecy in place and time? The child — was she meant to be? Raison d’être. On the designated night, she hovered on the cusp of Libra, the Just; pushed into the Autumnal Equinox, delivered in sorrow on fall’s first day. Mother and child, joined by an unjoyful accident. A blurry nebula. A foggy occurrence. Autumn might have brought them blue asters, sweaters, and school days. Instead, unloved and alone, amid storms and swoons of uncertainty, severed swiftly, rendered asunder by circumstance, careless chance, or a fool’s choice — happenstance. As the mother rose and fled her birthing bed, did she despair the facts were futile, or would be fabricated and falsified? Would her child’s origins be clouded by mystery, muddied, and muddled? That no tiny footprint would be pressed in the mystery hour? Named in haste and surrendered, with no hope of reunion, her child was whisked off, weeks old to the foundling home with nothing but an abundance of abstractions and queries destined to surface like the moon behind a fog: Did it happen? Why not this mother? Why another mother? Are there others? Will I ever know? “I’m adopted," she asserted but sensed she wasn't special, and dropped her sapphire birthstone in the playground dust. Spica, Maiden Virgo's brightest star; the point of Equinox, vaguely glimmers on her origins.

Memoir