By Pamela Mitchell
I will bundle you in blankets and place you
on porches in cure chairs to keep you
I leave you in care of white pine and balsam
may their ethers open your weary lungs
I will bundle you in blankets and place you
on porches in cure chairs to keep you
I leave you in care of lilac and lily-of-the-valley
may scent of sweet blooms open your heart
I will bundle you in blankets and place you
on porches in cure chairs to keep you
I leave you in care of stillwater lakes may
soothing waves slake your parched soul
I will bundle you in blankets and place you
on porches in cure chairs to keep you
I leave you in care of glorious granite may aged
mountain lend you its strength
I will bundle you in blankets and place you
on porches in cure chairs to keep you
I leave you in care I leave you I leave
Note: Our house in the Adirondacks was once a cure cottage for tuberculosis patients. On August 9, 2000 my mother sat in a cure chair on our porch. Ironically, she told my father “It doesn’t get any better than this!” He found her the next morning, having passed from this life.
Pamela Anna Theresa Micieli (Mitchell), MFA, R.N., is a recently retired nurse and has published poems in several journals and anthologies including: The Healer’s Burden, and Intensive Care: More Poetry and Prose By Nurses. Both of these were published by Univ. of Iowa Carver College of Medicine Press. She has also published in Pulse: Voices From the Heart of Medicine, as well as a chapbook entitled Finding Lost Pond by Finishing Line Press (2021).