POEM: Chemo Mother

You walk in grace
my Mother, my daughter,

A rising love as steel.

who carries life like water
in hands shaped from prayer

said life dripping unabashedly from between fingers.

You are invisible light
Radiant faced, a chemo-mystic

Caring lunatic, patient visionary,

Balanced on a high wire
above the pit of my stomach

Freefalling these dreams I have

these own bad dreams that
I cannot honor: of you in bed,

holding me hostage, rife with unable.

You walk in grace
O grandmother & sister

abandoner of logic,

whose upturned heliotrope face turns
toward weakened light

quivering at night, a weakened night, a

fevered flesh, a weakened night of shivering
and a mouth full of sores,

clutching one day tight as a fistful of spring grass,

and me, with insomnia that is my shivering,
at last cut free from my own wings of pain.