Another Chemotherapy Poem
Posted 10/8/2009
Posted in
This stunning poem was also sent to me from a friend in Colorado:
This was last year's winning Juror's Choice in the Icon Festival here in Durango:
During Chemo
by Bonnie J. Manion
I bear all that jazz like Love Supreme
bearning John Coltrane
In pierced flesh and spilled blood,
The treatment's dissonant chords
trotting my throat, diving up and down
a stomach heaving
with discord.
A roll of staccato reply
pounds in my brain,
throbbing the sound
of pure misery.
Story of salvation history.
Antiseptic light
Colliding
With gray despair
to a crash of cymbals
blurring colors of the room,
perverse womb of my only hope.
Saxaphone calls out repeatedlywails the burning pain,
my fortitude
stepping up and down,
faint with uncertainty.
Plucks at me,
with nurses trying
to revive some spirit,
like pushing wine on hyssop,
their offers of ice chips
as I'm stretched to the limit.
Blare of clarinet
screeches within me
pain's tyranny;
but at the back door
my Golgotha visitor
revives ivory hopes,
lancing through my ebony fears,
my hot tears, during the dissonant
dance of living through deathlinke chemo therapy.
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