Growing In A Place All Wrong

(I had no intention of either reading or writing to this prompt inviting one to share their "worst moment"–  However, after bearing witness and reading of the pain of others  I found I could not simply turn away) ...

Growing in a place all wrong

Newly back from those
frangipangi islands
where ugliness melted
in rainbow colors, clear
water and hot air wrapped
like an ever embrace

Newly back to the chill
the cold, the clatter of
gray steel and ugliness
undistracted, unexpected
an already burgeoning
second trimester sown
in perfumed paradise
secretly flowering
a bouquet under my
heart sparkling glints
of sunlight warming
cold steel promising
possibility

I smiled for forty eight
hours, put up a huge
pot of stew, painted the
kitchen yellow of those
happy faces and decided
with paint still wet on my
hands, that it could be good

That was when the first pain came
powerful as a crimson tsunami

That was not the worse part
Sitting on the toilet a towel
covering bloody thighs waiting
for a ride explaining to a dimple faced
three year old that “No he wasn’t going to
be a big brother” wasn’t the worst part

Even at hospital under clean sheets
washed and fresh and given hope that it
might all be a mistake, to be told in the morning
it wasn’t a mistake at all
was not the worst part

Through all of that there was comfort
soft as a carribean breeze, that everything
was for a reason, and four and a half months
does not mean life, embraced by the certainty
that some things are just not meant to be.

The worst part arrived in a moment
of waking in a frigid alcohol fumed room
hearing a well intentioned doctor with a
swinging delicate golden catching-light cross
smile a soft smile and sweetly say,
“your baby was perfect”

“just in the wrong place”
and slip me back into unconsciousness

into the black icy emptiness
a forever frozen involuntary
matricidal accomplice
of my “perfect baby” 

growing in a place all wrong

On poeming the painfully personal: reflections on this prompt