The Lilies

Source: Favim

When I learned I might have cancer,

I bought fifteen white lilies. Easter was gone:

the trumpets were wilted, plants crooked with roots

bound in pots. I dug them into the garden,

knowing they would not bloom for another year.

All summer, the stalks stood like ramshackle posts

while I waited for results. By autumn, the stalks

had flopped down. More biopsies, laser incisions,

the cancer in my tongue a sprawling mass. Outside,

the earth remained bare, rhizomes shrunken

below the frost line. Spring shoots appeared

in bright green skins, and lilies bloomed

in July, their waxed trumpets pure white,

dusting gold pollen to the ground.

                                                                     This year,

tripled in number, they are popping up again. I wait,

a ceremony, for the lilies to open, for the serpentine length

of the garden to bloom in the shape of my tongue’s scar,

a white path with one end leading into brilliant air,

the other down the throat’s canyon, black

and unforgiving. I try to imagine

what could grow in such darkness. I am waiting

for the lilies to open.

~ Karenne Wood

The Optimist

Source: Simply Business Coaching

The film showed stars of varying magnitude:
On the right, Libra, and on the left, Cancer,
Mapping the brain's horizons, vanishing points
Respectively of reason and desire.
The doctors liked her cheerful attitude,
Hope being all she had in her position.

She waited, calm.  Touch burned out first, then vision.
Emotion slipped.  Last would be lungs and heart.
But, noting trends, they told her Taste was next.
She asked then, could they pick out her last dress?

She wasn't making light.  It seemed to her
That cancer just rehearsed life's attitude
That one's desires must taper to a point,
Which has position, but no magnitude.

~ Joshua Mehigan

The Optimist

Source: Simply Business Coaching

The film showed stars of varying magnitude:
On the right, Libra, and on the left, Cancer,
Mapping the brain's horizons, vanishing points
Respectively of reason and desire.
The doctors liked her cheerful attitude,
Hope being all she had in her position.

She waited, calm.  Touch burned out first, then vision.
Emotion slipped.  Last would be lungs and heart.
But, noting trends, they told her Taste was next.
She asked then, could they pick out her last dress?

She wasn't making light.  It seemed to her
That cancer just rehearsed life's attitude
That one's desires must taper to a point,
Which has position, but no magnitude.

~ Joshua Mehigan

Chronic Lymphocytic Leukemia

Source: Shutterstock

When the monster grabbed him up, tossed him back
into its mouth, we had been swimming along holding hands
and I didn't let go, flew up dripping and dropped beside him
into the dark and foreign place where there were others
dimly swimming for their lives and there were teeth that grazed
our skins now and then as we lay very still, our hope ballooning,
rising up into the sinuses of the creature intermingled
with our fear so that both rose equally and were, we prayed,
equally compelling, but the truth, we knew, was that the beast
was dumb and barely knew we were there.
Every day
it tested its spikes against our naked fragile bodies,
some days teasing us by tipping forward, almost letting
us roll out into the frothy sea, but most days we lay still,
read medical books, listened to the messages of friends
sending love and encouragement from far away places
where life went on in warm kitchens and the linens
were clean and dry.
Finally, the thing decided not to decide,
let us wash out with the tide. We are swimming again
and the ocean is very blue. But there is a fin moving
beside us on the horizon and though it disappears
from time to time in the bright sun
at dusk it is always there
circling.

~ Gail Rudd Entrekin

Chronic Lymphocytic Leukemia

Source: Shutterstock

When the monster grabbed him up, tossed him back
into its mouth, we had been swimming along holding hands
and I didn't let go, flew up dripping and dropped beside him
into the dark and foreign place where there were others
dimly swimming for their lives and there were teeth that grazed
our skins now and then as we lay very still, our hope ballooning,
rising up into the sinuses of the creature intermingled
with our fear so that both rose equally and were, we prayed,
equally compelling, but the truth, we knew, was that the beast
was dumb and barely knew we were there.
Every day
it tested its spikes against our naked fragile bodies,
some days teasing us by tipping forward, almost letting
us roll out into the frothy sea, but most days we lay still,
read medical books, listened to the messages of friends
sending love and encouragement from far away places
where life went on in warm kitchens and the linens
were clean and dry.
Finally, the thing decided not to decide,
let us wash out with the tide. We are swimming again
and the ocean is very blue. But there is a fin moving
beside us on the horizon and though it disappears
from time to time in the bright sun
at dusk it is always there
circling.

~ Gail Rudd Entrekin