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.