Survivor

My three-and-a-half-year-old is a survivor.

It sounds surreal, but being alive now

was not always given, back then it was urgent

to excise her tumor, and that took a surgeon,

and it took a month by the hospital bed,

and it took from all of us all that we had.

How futile the want to offer and barter

your life for her life to have it restarted,

to search for the words to build up a sentence,

to answer the gaze that is full of acceptance,

and lips produce nothing, and prayers are vain,

and tears break the levies, too large to contain.

We told her the mouse had swallowed a stone.

She bandaged the scar and looked at her own,

without ever questioning fairness or need.

She begged us for water and something to eat.

The nurse gave her ice (I wanted to give her

the world on a platter). But she spiked a fever.

If time didn't stop, it was certainly slower.

We watched her first steps the second time over.

Men came and went, and came back in tandem,

and merged into shadows, and turned into phantoms.

Days blended with nights. Their quiet procession

passed down the hall and left no impression.

Only now that this long year is finally ending

do I dare write about it all. Notwithstanding

the passage of time, I feared giving a voice to

the word censored out as if it was poised to

break through the silence. But more and more often,

I dream of it locked up inside a dark coffin.

That is to say that this matter is closed now,

existing in memory only and frozen,

unable to grow, and I’m tuning it out,

and learning to live as if there’s a ground

under my feet and behind the curtain,

a familiar scene, where tomorrow is certain.