All Our Attempts at Healing

“There’s a cure for everything but death”

— Hadith of the Prophet (salla ‘llahu alayhi wa sallam)

All our attempts at
healing are to elude the long

loving arms of death coming
around us

The doorway filling with a sulfurous
light or beneficent radiance

elongating its rays into our hearts
into this little living blip between

two eternities

and somehow from this perspective
all the hustle and bustle of

earth life and its being taken so
seriously becomes

symphonic but strange

We all rush to our appointments
but dread God’s decreed one

on a Venetian canal under moonlight’s
eerie glow and slosh of brackish water

or standing at ease in our usual
nonchalance with

nothing particular to do or think or
say

The mortal bubble we’re
in and that’s in us just such an

evanescence that we naturally
hold back from hearing pop

Our song should twirl around it
the most magnificent of roses

the simplest and most
heartfelt of songs

And may God give me the strength to
believe all this if the

corridor of my own cure becomes
too narrow to

fit down

and only the ocean of love alone
remains left

to wash me clean

---

6/30/12 (from Down at the Deep End)

Categories: Poems, Cancer Treatment, Death, Love