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Impermanence
Fall 2000    Vol. 17 #1
Fall 2000    Vol. 17 #1

Poems/Not Poems

Mr. Lucky

By Richard Kohn

 
 

 

“Of all the gin joints in all the world, you have to walk into this one.”

 

A billion cold rocks, scarred and pitted,

Hurtle through space. Given the odds,

 

Aren’t we lucky, so unfathomably, incomprehensibly lucky,

Just to be alive.

 

A stray beam of light careens from one of these rocks.

Hits something. Bounces to something else

In a thing called my eye.

Behold—a magnolia in full bloom—

hanging like an apparition above the San Francisco Bay—

a lotus field from a Buddhist paradise.

 

How can I say I am not lucky? When a billion years of intergalactic

accidents have conspired to bring me this gift.

 

Indecision. Right? Left? Right? Left? I walk through a door

and there is the love of my life.

 

How lucky, how unfathomably, uncharacteristically lucky, that I just

didn’t blow it.

 

Her face reddens and strains. She screams. Another minute surely she

shall die. Or I will. Then the baby’s head emerges, tiny tired perfection,

weary as an old man, radiant as an angel.

 

How can I say that I’m not lucky? Just to be alive.

 

A doctor walks in. She need say nothing. The answer is etched in her eyes.

Those shadows on your liver are cancer, metastatic cancer.

 

But how can I say that I’m not lucky?

Just to be alive.

Like you.

 

 

From the Fall 2000 issue of Inquiring Mind (Vol. 17, No. 1)
© Richard Kohn

Author

Richard Kohn (1948–2000) was a documentary filmmaker, Tibetan Buddhist scholar, photographer, poet and author. His best-known book and award-winning film are both entitled Lord of the Dance: The Mani Rimdu Festival in Tibet and Nepal.

Author

Richard Kohn (1948–2000) was a documentary filmmaker, Tibetan Buddhist scholar, photographer, poet and author. His best-known book and award-winning film are both entitled Lord of the Dance: The Mani Rimdu Festival in Tibet and Nepal.

 
 
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