“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