I Enjoyed That
On Saturday,
the only thing I could do,
was wheel you to the cafe
and buy you the first hot coffee,
you'd felt in weeks.
On the way back to the ward,
we watched fat rabbits in
the garden.
Amidst heavy sloped shoulders,
from a half silenced mouth,
someone's ghost said:
“I enjoyed that.”
* Timothy John Bedford says “My mother had a stroke recently, though it seems mercenary, this is what I came up with.”
Bet she asked for a cake. Give her my tim. Jay
This is exactly what happens after a mother's stroke. A part of her dies. Just remember, the part of her that is still here is in dire need of life too. My mom, a stroke patient herself, is bored to death. As long as that part of her is alive, I have to try my best to hold on to the part of her that is still here. Good luck Tim.
thanks albert, that was written early on, the part that is still alive is very much so in mother's case. as you say, it's important to hold onto that part. hope things go well with you both.
I'm sure your mother felt as excited about that coffee as I did when I had ice cream with one of my first solid meals after my stroke last May. A few months later I wrote a poem about the experience, “A Taste of Normal”,now being considered by another pub. so I can't post it here yet. I wrote about my joy at seeing the ice cream on the tray, the refreshing splash of joy on my tongue, confirming that that organ worked, and the hope that my reluctant leg, my recalcitrant eye, would soon comply.
This is a wonderful tribute to your mother.
Roberta
What !!! You submitted to another publication? How could you be so faithless and untrue…
I submitted to another publication
but I was neither faithless nor untrue;
when my poem hastened toward a fresh evaluation
I was (sadly) not aware of you.
Roberta
thanks Roberta. i can't really begin to imagine what a stroke is like from the inside, they're bad enough from the outside. what struck me most was that it seemed to be the small and simple things in life that helped to begin to draw my mother back into the world, from wherever she was. just going for that coffee, for example, seemed to help as much as all the pyhsio and speech therapy.