You Are Here Poem by Marcel Aouizerate

This is where we are,
Where we learned first what was at stake,
This is where begins the long wait.

When you'll get out of surgery, my kind astronaut,
Despite the white gauze apparences,
You will have not changed the slightest,
When everyone else will have aged twenty years.

And if you really think your face has turned,
I will say, this is the true face of life
That is why it remained the same,
Beautiful whichever way

You threatened an oncologist with the
Responsibility of your sons and daughter.
I would have done the same,
Unfairness has to stop somewhere
And we are entitled to ask for
What's rightfully ours.

Things are going to happen in your sleep
To which you are the critical party.
It's like excavating a tunnel,
Tens of eager engineers delving down
Exchanging their short words of will:
And you, alone at the other end,
Tunneling the opposite way.

Today, we'll all meet, deep in your sleep.
Your family waiting in the windowless room,
The medical staff bending its sharp tools,
You, sleeping to the surface.

This is where we are,
And where the cancer ends.