As an adopted person; once an Air Force dependent, I write about loss, separation, impermanence, and adoptees' rights to truthful identity and natural heritage.
I generated this poem in a Bending Genres class with Jonathan Cardew, Alina Stefanescue, and Robert Vaughan, and it has taken a few shapes over the past several years. I hope you like it.
A.I. Blue Celestial Blur
Happenstance
Was there intention in Virgo’s stars? The prophecy of place and time. Meant to be. Raison d’être. On the designated September night, the cusp of Libra, the Just. She pushed into the Autumnal Equinox, and her child was delivered in sorrow — not her first fall. We were placed together by an unvirtuous accident, in a fog, like a nebula. An unjoyful occurrence,
Autumn brings blue asters, sweaters, school time, and tempests. Leila was twenty-six, loving, unloved, and alone – amid storms and swoons of uncertainty and abandonment — first she, then me — severed in a swift scoop of happenstance. Careless chance. Lives brought asunder by choice, by futility, by circumstance, or intention. In that mystery hour, no tiny footprint was taken.
As she rose from the birthing bed, did she consider beyond surrender, that the facts would be muddled and muddied by fabricated, flimsy, falsified papers? That her child would be shielded from her origins? She left without hope of seeing her again. The post-war charity case she’d named Ruth Ann was whisked off, weeks old, to the foundling home across South Carolina, her records sealed or destroyed, to protect all concerned.
Ruth Ann (Mary Ellen) first day with her adoptive parents in late Feb.1952, Sumter, SC.
I burned to tell the uncertain story. Other children knew their truths. I had only abstractions. Only, it happened—it happened. My birth happened. Not this mother — another mother, with girls and boys, maybe a husband. My father said they died, but you have us, he told me — our love. I tell them on the playground I’m adopted. They say, that’s good. You have a family. They know I’m different, and that’s uncomfortable. But I like my mystery. I like my story that I came from out of the blue. Blue like this sapphire sky. Blue like this birthstone ring I wore on my seventh birthday and soon lost. Carolina’s cloud-masked stars glimmer weakly on my origins.#
Happenstance
Beautifully written....a heart breaking poem. You are gifted. I admire you greatly.
Dianne Moritz