deathwatchpoem  #2
not the stuff of poems
camped in this caring hospice
two thousand miles from home
reading a stupid mystery book
while we wait for my brother’s wife
to die she already died last night
a daughter came too late but
the breathing started up again
been sixteen hours who knows
how many more I slept on a couch
sorta slept I’m not in the room
my brother vacillates now a zombie
now contained pain now a tear  
now truculently suspicious of
any help now a bit grateful for
some small help I’m no help
unless witness of caring counts
I do make him laugh when I recall
and he embellishes some outrageous
prank of our shared childhoods  
© Jacqueline Jackson 2006
Poems of simple pleasure, poems of quiet celebration, well, they aren’t anything like those poems we were asked to wrestle with in high school, our teachers insisting that we get a headlock on THE MEANING. This one by Dale Ritterbusch of Wisconsin is more my cup of tea.
Green Tea
There is this tea
I have sometimes,
Pan Long Ying Hao,
so tightly curled
it looks like tiny roots
gnarled, a greenish-gray.
When it steeps, it opens
the way you woke this morning,
stretching, your hands behind
your head, back arched,
toes pointing, a smile steeped
in ceremony, a celebration,
the reaching of your arms.
Reprinted from Far From the Temple of Heaven (Black Moss Press, April 2006) by permission of the author. Copyright © 2005 by Dale Ritterbusch. This weekly column is supported by The Poetry Foundation, The Library of Congress, and the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. This column does not accept unsolicited poetry.
Ted Kooser served as the U.S. Poet Laureate from 2004-2006. For more information, go to www.americanlifeinpoetry.org.
This article appears in Dec 14-20, 2006.
