(To Matthew Galsky)

 
I was just on the verge of turning twenty-one,

On  the day of your birth, when you gave your first cry to the world.

You could have curled up in the crook of my arm,

The way that I held my new-born nephew, at about the same time.

And speaking of time—look what the powerful, all-changing hand of time has done!

My nephew grew up, and named his first-born son after me,

Saying I had been more of a father to him than his biological father had been.

And you have grown up to be a doctor, a counselor of mankind’s cruelest curse,

Cancer.

You were a diapered darling baby, back then;

And I was a strong slim man, full of hope, being young.

Now it is you who are a man among the young men;

Whereas I, though not quite elderly, feel my life mortally stung;

And I likely shall not live long enough fully to grow old.

I’m too full of fear, not to add that word, “likely.”

I’m too scared to say, “Definitely”—though “definitely” is likely more true.

Strange, isn’t it, how time has made a sad sport of me, stealing my life-giving love,

Which gave life once to a baby my wife at the time did not allow to be born.

I’m old enough to have been your father, by the points on the time-line we occupy.

But if I had become a doctor myself, as I had long ago once intended,

Perhaps we would have become, at this crossroads of time, colleagues, or even friends.

Now, instead, you are the doctor who has to listen to me weep, and watch me die.

While my hope disintegrates—losing livelihood, losing love, losing life;

As I, like a helpless infant, give to the world that I love and must leave, my very last cry.

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Written by Michael LP, aka MLP
aka PoetWithCancer, aka PWC, aka Mr. Poet
Written on Thursday, April 16, 2009  5:06 pm
Copyright (C) 2010 by Michael L.P.