By guest poet, Lynne Fornieles
Superstorm heaves in, unstoppable,
black Cyclops eye spitting spikes.
Hearts pound as adrenalin bangs
and infomercial
send the city to higher ground.
Is this real?
Will the clapperboard shout
‘Cut. It’s a wrap’?
In Rockaway, they crouch
behind closed doors and boarded windows.
Three day ago she heard she had the cancer.
Two days ago scans made weather maps
illuminating its path.
Yesterday she learned therapies won’t help.
No drugs or rays or knife.
Today is all.
Her doctor stands beside her as she lies quietly wired.
Monitors dawn chorus to the hiss of oxygen
and quietly padding feet. She tells him and he listens.
Her fears for others, worries for the battered homeless,
worries for their number, worries for the wake that icy foams
behind bitter swirling skirts.
The wages of sin is death
she angry whispers to her pillow.
The storm fades, flickering screens reveal
cars tossed like salad into a ribboned bowl of boardwalk.
Old man in baseball cap with a face
that’s used to smiling, now wet with tears.
Sighing she opens to express
all that has gone and cannot be the same.
She cannot be the same.
The void of her words
forms a space and they sit together, silent .
Pale morning light seeps
through sterile glass.
Smiling she weeps as memories
arc behind her eyes.
He takes her hand and feels it cool,
as she copes with the storm.
A tribute to Dr JS and his patient 12th November 2012
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