Prompt Day 18: A poem based on grief.
Hold my Hand I am Tired
Hold my hand I am tired.
I visit you in the morning;
feed you. That was before
you began refusing food.
Thankfully you sometimes
Forgot and I spooned small
morsels even when you uttered
cruel morphine-induced words.
I would raise the spoon
to your beautiful mouth.
Hold my hand I am tired.
It is evening. Yesterday,
I sat with you until midnight.
I share the sittings with family.
You said cruel things to them.
Curse the morphine: but it’s
not always to blame.
Hold my hand I am tired.
You try to speak. This time
it was garbled. You are your
old self. But please hold
my hand, I am tired. You
seem not to be. Then I spoke.
Both of us know what I said.
It was something like “Let go.”
You know, you must know now –
tiredness makes us strange.
The tightness of your lips
even as the coma came quick.
The last thing to go is the hearing.
Again and again, I rephrase
what earlier I had said.
I held your hand through long hours
of the night. I returned at dawn.
Late afternoon the family took
a short break. We were alone.
We were holding hands; a sigh
so gentle. That was all. But it
is not touch: the last thing to go
is hearing. I had, by then,
rephrased it again and again. “Let go!”
Benita H. Kape © 18.4.2019
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