A Matter of Fate
by Todd Weinger
What
a bizarre stroke of fate,
that
we should be born at this time,
to
this place, with these lives. The odds
are
too impossibly great to ponder,
far
greater even than the chance that life could
exist
at all on this planet,
in
this galaxy, or this universe.
And
yet every blessed moment passes and blurs
into
the next, it seems; days slip into
decades
without our noticing, and the memories
we
make forever swim around in our dreams.
Stranger
yet to think
we’re
all given even one chance to ride this
wave
called life, and see for the briefest while
whatever
ups and downs the gods
might throw our way; and how
many get on at the
worst
possible time, or fall off so much
sooner than what they had in mind.
Maybe that’s why
I woke up in this darkest hour, moments
before dawn, when nothing in the world
could possibly be right or wrong, so I could
remind myself
that the odds of having one good day,
one good minute, or even one good second
are so impossibly small, the fact that
some of us can have so many is the strangest,
most splendid miracle of all.
