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Linda Barrett
Two poems
Mother
You used to be a strong little woman
Racing to pick up nannies
and grandchildren
In your 1995
metallic
lavender Saturn Sedan.
You belied your true age,
rushing around the blue
and white kitchen
in the early, early
morning before I went to work.
Now, you sit in a
hospital bed,
the sharp white
fluorescent lights of your room
revealing all of your
wrinkles
and how frail and
helpless
you look with your
increasingly gray hair
pressed against those
stark bright crisp white
hospital
efficient
pillow cases.
My heart cries out:
I don't want to leave
you,
All alone in that
blindingly bright white
hospital bed with all
those computerized
gadgets strapped to your
body.
All you have for company in
this naked tiled room
is the constant beep and
chatter of that machine
called a monitor which
speaks to you in a language
only understood and
translated by some nurse or
doctor.
It may check up on all your
vital signs but
it can't share
conversations with you
about bridge or
grandchildren or stories
about your various friends
from the
Overlook Hills Women's
Club.
My heart again cries out:
can't leave you alone
with your only companionship
the nurses in their
immaculate white uniforms
dressed in their sterile
angels of mercy costumes
who march in and out to
the quick trot of their
curved white boots and
check up on you within
a few seconds to rush out
to see another patient
to make sure
you're still
alive
so you can pay the
hospital bill for being here.
You look so frail and elderly
as you sit alone
suffering in your pain
after the doctors
have surgically removed
all that was whatever
that was left of you
which biologists
recognized and called female
I want to reach out
to you with my daughter's heart
because now our roles
have changed in this new
situation
which is before us and now
it's me who wants
to take care of you.
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Barrett
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