The Invalid - Three Poems

This blog post is dedicated to Laurel and Jai Ap - two millennials 
who, along with the Parkland students,
give me hope for the generation
who will hopefully have a world left to manage.

A Thousand Autumn Leaves
 

I haven't been my normal blogger self lately, having spent a couple of months in hospital. But I managed to escape, and amongst ghastly things like blood transfusions, morphine, and getting some of my internal organs rearranged, I am still in the land of the living. Just.

While there I wrote a few poems.

Here are three of them.

Life on Land - An Evolution

Ghost-like they creep
Ascending through the stages
Of walker, shuffle-stick and cane
Till complete independence is achieved.
Here in the half-life-hell of the intensive ward
where failure is success and
where "sans everything”
is the name of the game.

A Fragile Autumn Leaf from China

Peaceful and serene she lies there.
A fragile autumn leaf
past its prime.
In her hospital bed.

She hails from a village
near Beijing where she was born
the year that Tolstoy died, 1910.
She speaks only her local dialect.

On evenings she offers  food
to anyone who passes
and speaks to me gently
as if to wish me well.

Tonight I saw her sleeping.
dreaming, clasping a tissue
as if it were a fan
and she was shyly greeting
her lover in nineteen twenty six.

Social Integration
(Before you can leave rehabilitation, you have to show you can walk on the sidewalks of Manhattan. It is called "Social Integration"!)

My first day under the sky
tentatively treading
on the uneven streets of New York.
They make me use a cane.
They set milestones every few meters.
I used to walk a mile
in these shoes.
Such is the winter of my discontent.

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That's all folks!