Hope to Cope

Hope symptoms mean nothing.
Hope for benign biopsy.
Hope they got it all.
Hope  chemo will work.
Hope for minimal side effects.
Hope for a miracle.

Cope with with diagnosis.
Cope with uncertainty.
Cope with hair loss, Cope with emotions.
Cope with chemo failure..
Cope with  meeting death.

Deepening

Last year this time you
kept your colors to yourself..
Excited, afraid  to start high school,
ready, not ready, you flashed
palest lavender, bare mist of green.

Pale with frightened promise,
ahaky in flight, tempted to fade
to invisibile. Instead you caught
the light, glow peacock purple
emerald green,  ready to  be seen.

Blink

Cancer strengthens hold.
You weaken each day.
I cannot live without you.
I scream, rage, cry.
I cannot live without you.  

Blink

You grab me hard, hold
me eyes to eyes to soul..
You will if you have to.
And I know this is true.
And this truth holds. 

Out of Drought

Out of Drought

Exceptional drought
all June, all July.
burn bans in August.
Field lies brown,
flowerless, absent
chorus of frog song.
Scorched grass
scratches legs.
Sun cracks earth.

Night of September first,
single thunder storm,
lasts only one hour.
Come sunrise field
glistens white with
fresh congregation
of glorious rain lilies
Sometimes regeneration
doesn''t take much.

Stories Unbidden

Darkened theater
in Aurora exploded
like shattered heads
into thousands of
unwelcome stories
Life plans spattered
like arterial blood.
Nothing is the same.
Evangelists tell us
God was not in the
theatre because we
ban him from schools.
Cell phones ring in
dead kids pockets,
will ring for months.
Freshmen in college
dorms will get new
room mate assignments..
Never will know why.
Mothers will struggle
for words to describe
fathers kids won't
remember. He went 
to see  Dark Knight
Rises and a  crazy
man shot him and
he died, but he
always got garlic
butter on his popcorn
and  he loved you.
Kids will wonder if
the killer saw himself
as a dark knight.
Parents and husbands
will go through closets
and tell themselves
stories about what
their child or wife
would want them
to save to remember.
Friends will make
up stories about how
their friends felt when
the dark exploded,
about who froze and
who was brave.. I will
have to decide whether
to say yes to next teen
plea for midnight movie
based on the stories I
tell myself about madness
and chance and what
happened in Aurora..

Reprieve

Wisdom weighs heavy,
Colors  how we live
build, love, destroy, die.
Silences impulse to
grasp, hurt, boast,  flee.
maximizes love's glow.

Nonsense offers reprieve.
No pressure to believe.
No need to doubt
Wild winged horses,
Swiss cheese moon,
Pot of rainbow gold .

This short poem was written for Poets United Vice/Versa, where the four words to use in your writing were the antonyms doubt & believe and the antonyms wisdom & nonsense. 

Avalanche Lily (for Heidi)

If cancer isn't an avalanche, what is?
Crazy cascade of cells crushing out life.
Path of mestasis, Path of avalanche,
lies unstable, mined with looming danger.
The miracle is she smiles, remembers
a birthday, bakes a pie, dances in the wood.
Avalanche lily, she blooms where she must
and teaches me to put down roots,send up
shoots no matter how uncertain the soil.