For my Aborted Child

It isn’t that I don’t think of you.
I do so every day.
It is not that I do not have regrets
Because I do. How could I not?

How to make amends with an act
That seemed so right at the time?
At the time! That is what abortion is.
Yours was a time that could not come.

Would I have been a good father
Had we acted differently, taken a chance?
I do not know. I doubt it.
Some people are meant for parenthood; others not.

I know I would have tried. Gallantly, possibly.
But trying and succeeding are often miles apart.
The gamble did not seem wise,
To make misery from something so unplanned.

So, I own my responsibility in your demise,
But there is no guilt. Only chagrin
At what might have been had we dared…
Taken your gestation in our stride.

Winter Landscape

There’s a smell to winter,
An entanglement with a long ago childhood.
I cannot pinpoint this unprovable fear,
That sense of danger attached to cold.

The sharpness that strikes at my nostrils,
The loneliness that seems endless
When the nights arrive too soon,
Without enough sunlight to the days.

I lost myself in one of those angry winters,
When the sky was stark, the threat of calamity real.
The message as clear as the nights were long:
Only one side wins in this recessive landscape.