It was long and hard for him. When he went in, he thought it would be a day or two, tops. It was what the doctor said, and then it dragged on and on, and he started thinking maybe he wasn't really sick. That made it so hard for him.
It reminds me of the poet Robert Herrick who wrote quite a number of poems on the occasion of his own demise. He obviously thought he was dying long before he actually did. We're more durable than we think.
I'm sorry for the loss of your uncle. Even when the passing is difficult, it reminds us of the splendor of living, even as we reach back for it. And even those with very little life left offer us something splendid.
I was born in a refugee camp in Germany after World War II, and came with my parents Jan and Tekla and my sister Donna to the United States as Displaced Persons in 1951. My Polish Catholic parents had been slave laborers in Nazi Germany. Growing up in the immigrant and DP neighborhoods around Humboldt Park in Chicago, I met Jewish hardware store clerks with Auschwitz tattoos on their wrists, Polish cavalry officers who still mourned for their dead horses, and women who walked from Siberia to Iran to escape the Russians. My poems try to remember them and their voices.
These poems have appeared in my chapbook Language of Mules and in both editions of Charles Fishman’s anthology of American poets on the Holocaust, Blood to Remember.
Since retiring from teaching American Literature in 2005, I've written two new books about my parents. My new poems about them appear in my books Echoes of Tattered Tongues (Aquila Polonica, 2017) and True Confessions (Darkhouse Books, 2019).
4 comments:
God bless him. I wish it had been easier.
Me too.
It was long and hard for him. When he went in, he thought it would be a day or two, tops. It was what the doctor said, and then it dragged on and on, and he started thinking maybe he wasn't really sick. That made it so hard for him.
It reminds me of the poet Robert Herrick who wrote quite a number of poems on the occasion of his own demise. He obviously thought he was dying long before he actually did. We're more durable than we think.
I'm sorry for the loss of your uncle. Even when the passing is difficult, it reminds us of the splendor of living, even as we reach back for it. And even those with very little life left offer us something splendid.
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