PROGNOSIS

It was his unsteadiness of gait
his slurred baby words
as though a drunken man
had taught him
that gave the game away.

 

Only two, and the scans
were far worse:
secondaries in his spine
liver and nodes

and then the sardonic pathology
that marked our entry
to the land of astrocytoma.

 

We visited foreign cultures
continents of chemo
surgical islands
archipelagos of different doses
and duration of radiation.
Stage 4 the doctor declared
so he'd be dead
within a year.

In such a perished
and abominable land
it’s only chance that sees him

still alive at nine.
But each time he gets a cold
it's my brain not his that melts
and the sun goes out
and I walk with a wobble
across a floor of fear
as he did seven years ago.

LIBERATION

Today I leave Afghanistan,
its grievous wounds, missiles,
shouted orders, charges,
deceits and betrayals, drones,
its impassive Buddhist monuments
with torn-off limbs and bullet-pocked faces,
poisonous and exhilarating poppies,
deserts and mined mountain places.

 

But not all bad and never dull.
Paradoxically I never felt imprisoned
by the captivity of war.
There's always a way
to soak with excitement
in another's flesh.

 

 

 

 

Usually we only show a third:
two-thirds of our selves are locked
in our personal Guantanamos
until war or crime or illness
changes the game and society's gates
are blasted open
and for one brief shining hour
we are truly free.