Lost

Inside a travel bag, I found my missing

red wool sock, in a winter jacket, one earring.

My wallet turned up months after a grocery

trip, on a coat peg, nestled in the scoop of a cap.

A constant struggle to track, my phone may lie

beneath a book or pillow, its charge exhausted.

I believed in God, when my keys showed up in the freezer—

though it did seem an odd way to answer a prayer.

And when, preparing to wash an apron, I checked

its pocket and felt two puzzle pieces, AWOL

a year, it seemed a miracle. Search not for “lost”

items in France; the word “perdu” implies

they’re gone for good. Ask for “forgotten” things

at the Office of Found Objects, Objets Trouvés.

But my son is lost, and I haven’t forgotten, decades

since he wasn’t born, since I allowed

his tiny body’s destruction. No sweet-talking that one;

I saw the vacuum jar. Memories

of what will never be, I find and find

again, like acorns stashed in the ground by blue jays,

sprouting to oak seedlings in an unmowed field.

Alice Haines’s poems can be found in: Does It Have Pockets?, Dunes Review, The Healing Muse, Northern New England Review, Off the Coast, Pangyrus LitMag, Pine Row, Portland Press Herald’s Deep Water column, Relief: Journal of Art and Faith and Touchstone Literary Magazine. Several of her poems have been finalists in Maine Postmark Poem Contests. A retired physician living in Maine, she volunteers at a free health clinic. Together with her husband, she enjoys nurturing native plants, tracking wildlife and birding.