Dear Readers,
Happenstance explores themes of chance and circumstance, delving into how unanticipated events shape lives and identities. In my memoir, a similar poem, Out of the Blue, alludes to my adoptive father’s Air Force career. And in Through the Yew Hedge: A Tale of Identity Magic, (Islay Corwin), the transcendent prophecy speaks:
“The Foretelling
Under the stark flicker of fluorescent lights, white moths flutter
cryptic scripts: What does Virgo portend? The prophecy of place and
time, the raison d’être? She, the child of changing seasons, was pushed
into the Autumn Equinox, delivered in sorrow on the first day of fall
under a sapphire sky, on the cusp of Libra, the Just…”
Later, before the First Council; the gleeful fae recite:
“Happenstance: The Fae’s Prophecy, Revisited
Virgo, your stars predicted sweaters and storms,
uncertainty and dread,
an accident of place and time…”
Happenstance
Virgo, your stars predicted there’d be sweaters,
storms, uncertainty, and
dread of this
accident of place
and time.
Her designated arrival on the twenty-first,
the cusp of Libra,
first of fall,
Mother’s un-joyful occurrence.
Happenstance.
She was alone, unloved, abandoned
with no potential
but for me.
First, she, then me.
Once before, and twice, then three.
Had she, on rising from her birth ward bed
considered, beyond surrender, a plan, instead?
That those papers would not hold true,
the facts of our fated circumstances?
Happenstance.
That they’d be muddled, muddied by illegitimacy?
Fabricated, flimsy, flat-out false, filed
within a mystery hour,
no tiny footprints rendered —
a false identity.
Her baby girl was set aside, left with guesses—Only,
it happened — my birth happened.
This is my story: A mother, another somewhere,
and I, the mystery of a difference,
the unintended me.
Out of the blue, blue like a sapphire,
September sky, blue like my birthstone, fall’s blue asters.
Virgo’s cloud-screened stars
glimmer faintly
on my origins.
This poem has been previously published in both prose and verse.
https://online.flippingbook.com/view/149890563/
© Mary Ellen Gambutti
About the Author
Mary Ellen Gambutti, writing under the pen name Islay Corwin, is known for essays that weave botanical traditions with themes of identity, memory, and belonging. Drawing on her own experience as an adoptee, her work explores the quiet mystery of happenstance, where coincidence becomes recognition. Bridging personal essays and memoir with the Silverton Estate novellas, she writes in the liminal, where the ordinary reveals itself as something larger—without explanation or solution.
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