Tag: cancer

“A Secret I’ve Said Three Times and Still Feel As If I’ve Never Told,” Elijah Patterson

I appointed myself the guardian of his breath.
This man, nearly a stranger to me in eulogy,
rasping and gurgling his final days
while I sat at the head of his bed reading
      (a good tribute)
      and my grandmother smoothed his quilt
            and asked if I was ready,
                  and if I was strong.

When she left to wash the same dishes again
      (how important it is to be useful,
      how important it is to be needed);
I apologized to him
for her speaking over his head
as if he were not there.

Hours pass, and positions change,
our bodies follow the hands of the clock,
chairs in the house stops on the dial.
We rotate from his bed,
to couch and kitchen and bedroom–.
And then,
across the room,
I heard it–
      the silence.

He’s quiet now.

            I said, after a longer pause
            than I have ever admitted,
            these three times I told.

And his son said

Good.

      And then–

Wait.

We walked to his father’s hospital bed,
(seven paces).
He pressed his fingers to his father’s silent throat
feeling for the rubbery tube of the carotid,
opened his own mouth–

and then–

      a gasp–

            –bright, upright, lungs full,
            teeth a decrepit grey fence
            with its gate swung open–

and then–

                  a fall–.

And I spoke again to the shape of his ear:

            Didn’t mean to scare you.
            Just checking.

Even though I knew he couldn’t hear.

“Dialysis,” Lucille Clifton

after the cancer, the kidneys
refused to continue.
they closed their thousand eyes.

blood fountains from the blind man’s
arm and decorates the tile today.
somebody mops it up.

the woman who is over ninety
cries for her mother, if our dead
were here they would save us.

we are not supposed to hate
the dialysis unit. we are not
supposed to hate the universe.

this is not supposed to happen to me.
after the cancer the body refused
to lose any more. even the poisons
were claimed and kept

until they threatened to destroy
the heart they loved. in my dream
a house is burning.

something crawls out of the fire
cleansed and purified.
in my dream i call it light.

after the cancer i was so grateful
to be alive. i am alive and furious.
Blessed be even this?

“The Reassurer,” Wendell Berry

People in the throes of national prosperity, who breathe poisoned air, drink poisoned water, eat poisoned food,
who take poisoned medicines to heal them of the poisons that they breathe, drink, and eat,
such a people crave the further poison of official reassurance. It is not logical,
but it is understandable, perhaps, that they adore their President who tells them that all is well, all is better than ever.
The President reassures the farmer and his wife who
have exhausted their farm to pay for it, and have exhausted themselves to pay for it,
and have not paid for it, and have gone bankrupt for the sake of the free market, foreign trade, and the
prosperity of corporations;
he consoles the Navahos, who have been exiled from their place of exile, because the poor land contained
something required for the national prosperity,
after all; he consoles the young woman dying of cancer caused by a substance used in the normal course of national
prosperity to make red apples redder;
he consoles the couple in the Kentucky coalfields, who sit watching TV in their mobile home on the mud of
the floor of a mined-out stripmine;
from his smile they understand that the fortunate have a right to their fortunes, that the unfortunate have a right to their misfortunes, and that these are
equal rights.
The President smiles with the disarming smile of a man who has seen God, and found Him a true American,
not overbearingly smart.
The President reassures the Chairman of the Board of the Humane Health for Profit Corporation of America,
who knows in his replaceable heart that health, if it came, would bring financial ruin;
he reassures the Chairman of the Board of the Victory and Honor for Profit Corporation of America, who has been wakened in the night by a dream of the
calamity of peace.