We speak in whispers, move in silence from room to room, listen to the oxygen’s steady pump moisture bubbling through the tubes. Three days unresponsive. I sit with her until someone else comes in. Years from now I will remember these moments, the counter scattered with crumbs from half eaten sandwiches, the tide low, winds calm, cormorants perched motionless in a line along the pilings. At first they seem an omen, messengers from the dead, but I will wonder later perhaps they were something other, mournful attendants or angels, their black wings spread wide against the late day burn.
Grateful acknowledgment to ONE ART: a journal of poetry for publishing this poem in 2022.
Poet, teacher, editor, Cheryl Baldi is the author of “The Shapelessness of Water” and a former Bucks County Poet Laureate. A resident of Doylestown for over 40 years, she volunteers for the Bucks County Poet Laureate Program and the Arts and Cultural Council.
Poet’s Corner is curated by Bucks County Poet Laureate Tom Mallouk and supported by a grant to the Bucks County Herald Foundation made possible by Marv and Dee Ann Woodall.
To submit a poem for consideration, email it to Heraldpoetscorner@gmail.com. If the poem has been previously published, please say where it first appeared.
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