literature
A Tragedy Inspired Poem
Recently, one of my poems was published in The Edmonds Beacon newspaper. The poem was inspired by a tragic car accident I witnessed several years ago. A scene that etched into my memory.
That’s how it often happens for us writers, something––a face, a scarf, a doorway, or an incident––imprints on our psyche and ultimately, we use it in a piece of work. Here is the poem that resulted from that tragic afternoon, followed by a brief epilogue.
SEPTEMBER MOON
Beneath the September moon
A flicker of weak light
The faint memory of her mothering years––lost
Unraveled
Tiny strings frayed
Scattered
Across the fallow fields of her life.
Alone in the darkness she feels
Loosely tethered to both worlds
One where she still sees her children
Hears them sing
The other where she floats endlessly in the hollow silence of night
Linked to them by one last ethereal string.
She closes her eyes
Afraid to see, to hear, to know,
What happened
––in her wine-colored afterglow.
Beneath a September moon
Reminders––
Buried deep
Lost in her spirit
The solitary tills of time
Of heart
And soul
Barren of love, barren of life
––and she knows
The piercing betrayal of one more glass of wine.
She now imagines her children as dormant butterflies
Who will not awaken any time soon
Their innocent lives arrested by
Mommy’s cocktails at noon.
Beneath fading lunations
She hears their cries
Her sweet butterflies
And she knows
Therein is her penance
Her dark destiny
––a life sentence
To carry aural witness of their final cries
To her spiritual wasteland
Filled with echoes of a mother’s bittersweet lies.
Tiny fingertips, like frayed strings
Once adored
Now, grasping
Reaching
Weakening
Tearing away from the cord.
Epilogue
This was a tragedy about a mother who attended a wine tasting luncheon, tasted too much wine, and then decided to pick up her two toddlers from daycare.
I was three cars behind her on the road when suddenly her car veered over the side of the road and crashed into a tree. We all slammed on our brakes. There was an officer parked in the parking lot not ten feet away. We all ran toward the car, but he arrived first and motioned for us all to stand back.
He pulled the mother from the front seat. Her head was gashed, blood dripping into her eyes, all over her hands, and was sprayed against her white silk blouse like blood on snow.
Her piercing screams horrified us all. She kept screaming and crying hysterically. “I’ve killed my babies!”
The five or six of us who’d leapt from our cars to help stood frozen. Collective dread filled all our faces. Approaching sirens echoed in the background.
The officer got her seated at the curb while the rest of us, me included, finally inched up to the car, fearful of what we might see in the back seat.
Her screams grew more hysterical. “I’ve killed my babies! … Oh God, I‘ve killed them.”
But as we all leaned down and trepidatiously peered into the windows, we were surprised by what we saw.
There in the back seat, staring at us, were two small children, safely buckled into car seats, looking at us like we were aliens.
They were fine. Afraid, but otherwise fine.
The mother was arrested for drunk driving and endangering her children, who again, I stress, were unharmed.
I learned later in the newspaper that her husband divorced her, and she lost custody and all visitation of her children. It was her third drunk driving incident, so she also went to prison for a time.
Perhaps her drunken terror that awful day was a mournful premonition. She did, after all, lose her children.
Mindy Meyers-Halleck 
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