This poem, written fifteen years ago as my youngest son began (thankfully successful) chemotherapy for a rare immune system disease, was recently published for the first time by Sapiens.
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| "Salvation can be danger thinly veiled" |
Unlikely Blessings
Peace can be a sky-blue hospice with daffodils
a grave green lawn for innocents
bald and serene as Buddhist monks
Happiness can be written in Chinese
on a decal clinging to a jade bar of soap
at the visitors’ sink
Beauty can be simple and fragile as children laughing
the play of skin and shadow
under the unknowing sun
Fate can be exactly the size and shape of an olive
diagnosis or misdiagnosis
a surgeon squinting over a slide
Salvation can be danger thinly veiled
caustic milk of the periwinkle
halfway from malignant to benign
Faith can be a near empty chapel
waiting for you to get desperate enough
to sing with the others Ha-ha-hallelujah
Hope can be the worst kind of houseguest
hanging between the quick and the damned
counting unlikely blessings
Listen to my reading of the poem at Soundcloud.
Learn more about the composition of this poem, and how it was inspired by the work of Paul Celan, at Sapiens.
See my previous blog post about my son's chemotherapy with vinblastine, a cancer-treating drug derived from traditional medicine: "Three Cheers for Periwinkle!"
Read the prize-winning poem "The Fish Trap" featured last year by Sapiens for World Poetry Day.
Read my coronavirus haiku, "Yellow Jessamine."
