The Cancer Sonnets Series Poem by William F Dougherty

Candle Power in Intensive Care

The unction cools my brow, the candle shines
and forms a line of sacramental brede;
the priest half-chants the text, and makes the signs,
jogging my mind with the redemptive creed
I learned to lisp in church. A night-shift nurse
shows up with rosary beads and borrowed shawl.
I squeeze my morphine pump: the pain is worse.
A gurney clatters down the empty hall.

I wonder what my blur of being meant
to warrant such precautionary flush;
I wonder why the candle's Sunday scent
expands and cloys the sterile room. A hush
folds up all sound; the candle snuffs its flame,
a wisp absconds with a stowaway name.



The Zipper

They sank a silver zipper in my chest:
a foot of snag-toothed staples used to chain
the cavity where cancer bloomed its yeast.
The lovely morphine drips: I don't complain;
I feel aloof. The nurses glide like ghosts,
their chat like crinkled cellophane; I sway
upon an inner stalk each time I'm dosed.
The lights stay on to keep it day all day.

A voice in surplice hints I'm deeply hurt,
provisional, as rumored in my blood.
My tongue feels bronzed; I try but fail to blurt
against demeaning signs of likelihood-
a gullet's a hard barter for a cure.
I'll bite down hard, disjunctively endure.



A Provisional

The fatigue is iron. Breath strains like pleas
as morphine slips down lucid tubes to ease
a snarl beneath the silver-staple line
frenzied for each dose of cloaking anodyne
to heal the salvaged gullet-stub, at least,
where the carcinoma had spumed like yeast,
but now the gliding nurses scratch on charts
the vital signs of heart—but not both hearts.

Like Ishmael alone, the others I could name
that the assassin of cells seized or maimed
leave me, a provisional of wounded time,
their amanuensis armed with only rhyme
to set down for their revenants a page
defying malice with their marrow's rage.