She lives today who might have died
had you not taken that particular path,
under the tower, across the vacant square,
past registers of local crime. Had you gone
over the hill behind Brack Mound,
the child not three hours old
would not they said have lived.
But you heard that night the child,
saw in a bag one kicking foot
in the moonlit cold.
You later sought a reason
why providence made you choose
that path, some premonitory sound
of pain that forecast what you’d hear
if you took that workaday street
which brought you there -
was it providence placed the child
beneath a broken window,
the growing cold which made it cry
entreating you to find it when
no other person at that time
was likely to pass by?
Your indiscretion served the child
and divinity shaped your end you say
when the child’s own end was near.
Does providence in retrospect,
or chance in prospect shape the ends
which we rough-hew in our defence?
It matters not perhaps how we
interpret things. Matters more
the happiness, the wonder
to have been, or felt one was,
an instrument. Whether or not
one can construe that fate or chance,
or even God is on our side,
matters less than the profound
sense of being and having given,
on a night path, by a castle mound.
©Terry Hodgson2020
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