When you are born you should be presented with a 70-year-diary, every day already filled in, a bright red ribbon tied around the cover. Then, as you work your way through life, you could constantly check where you were up to and what lay ahead. Or perhaps it would be best to leave it closed, the ribbon left done up.
Category: cancer
Dead Sea
Old age finds you sailing the Sargasso, through scattered “In Memoriam’ notices littering the surface like seaweed.
Count down
In old age, save me from counting down towards death from cancer, one spoon of morphine at a time, in an aged total care facility.
Cross words
In old age, save me from counting down towards death, one crossword at a time, in an old people’s home.
We have an announcement to make
A cancer diagnosis isn’t an “intimation of mortality”. Instead it announces, with the blast of trumpets, the roar of jet engines, the explosion of dynamite, that your life has changed in a big way, and that your mortality is no longer a given.
Fever
Diseases like malaria, lymphoma, shingles, can lay dormant in a healthy body for years until some weakness emerges in the immune system and they erupt to damage the unfortunate human. Much like fascism can lie dormant in the body politic.
Sick room
Watching America suffering from Trump is like watching an old friend stricken with cancer or a virulent bacterial disease.
Eye of the storm
My childhood home
had a “lounge room”,
a room in the centre of the house
almost never used, but with the best furniture,
rarely sat upon, the piano,
not played, fallen silent,
since my grandfather died,
too young, too young,
and the record player.
It was, in theory, the place
where important visitors could
be taken. But most of our
visitors were unimportant, friends,
who were happy sitting in the kitchen.
The Minister of our church
might have qualified in importance,
I suppose,
but he rarely if ever came.
So it was a quiet room,
a dark room with no window,
a neat room with no mess,
no detritus of living.
It was in the very centre
of the house, surrounded
by rooms full of activity and noise –
kitchen, bathroom, bedrooms, laundry,
television room, dining room.
Every house needs a quiet, still, centre,
a place for reflection.
So does every human being.
Out of the blue
Chickens
keep their eyes
on the ground
as they work the soil
scratch scratch scratch
peck peck peck.
Eagles
keep their eyes
on the ground
watching the chickens
as they work the soil
oblivious to death from the sky.
As are we.
Deceptive
I look at my hands,
their backs an old man’s hands.
I look at my feet,
their toes an old man’s toes.
I look at my face,
its wrinkles show an old man’s face.
But,
I look in my mind,
its curiosity is a young man’s still.
