the days dropped away, snowflakes melting in air
before they land, each a disappearing act of waiting
beside her sleeping shell, comma-curled in magic bed,
our daughter, 39, and clutched in cancer’s fist.
Her mom quakes with aftershocks, exhaustion of tears
in darkened half moons under her eyes, cancer’s thumb
prints impressed, imprint embossed through and through,
the great bass bell tolling in our hollowed halves
so even our feet reverberate with the iron news
of coming loss, of future foreclosed and suffering
in numbered days the new promissory note:
the last birthday just passed and now receding,
limousine diminishing in review mirror,
the last squall on windows and roof, the downpour drummers
myriad and swift, the last new growth on rose canes,
the final unfolding from nothing to profusion,
the last buzz of radiation, the thousand bees
encircling her delicate skull and sounding
like the orchard in April, the last time we will
hold her.
Cecil Morris, a retired high school English teacher, has poems appearing in The Ekphrastic Review, Hole in the Head Review, New Verse News, Rust + Moth, Sugar House Review, and elsewhere. He has been nominated for Best of the Net in 2024 and Pushcarts in 2021, 2022, and 2023. He and his indulgent partner, the mother of their children, divide their year between California’s central valley and the Oregon coast.