Member Poem

The Battles of Philadelphia
 
 
 
They share a ward, one in each corner,
and my father must have four decades on the oldest.
His neck—C-1 and C-2—broken from a midnight wreck
in the Pine Barrens.
He wears a halo, screwed into his head, metal rods bolted
onto the vest to immobilize;
wholly medieval, but necessary at his age.
By far, he is the luckiest: he can move his arms and legs.
 
The young are here from the front.
 
I will not lie,
at another time, in another place,
I might judge
—though I don’t claim to know how reckonings work,
their dispersal or degree.
 
I might wonder if he had put others in the ground, or in a chair,
like the one he occupies.
I might nod my head in silent condemnation,
Hey, that happens to slingers in the wild, wild east…
 
Only later, I might wonder if he had been coming from his girlfriend’s,
or Bible study, or standing on the corner when the slug hit his spine,
killing the electricity, dropping him like a marionette let loose
by the puppeteer’s hand.
 
But now I cannot.
 
And after my visit, when the elevator opens and he rolls inside
and turns at the back,
shriveled thighs swaddled in slack jeans,
asking if I could hit his floor,
I nod and press the button in what feels like an act of mourning.
 
 
originally published in Hippocrates Prize for Poetry and Medicine anthology