by Ruth Weinstein
Cancer had chewed away half her mouth and face,
carving the soft palette, chiseling the jawbone,
cutting her cheek out, slicing the tongue lengthwise.
Her suffering lasted for years, her skin grafted
from pale tender patches. Altogether, her visage,
which was not altogether, frightened children in
grocery stores, repulsion warring with compassion.
She had not eaten solid food in years and then
was fed by a tube until her small intestine perforated
and kindly pneumonia escorted her to the last dance.
Her son and his wife, my friends, sat with her at the
painful end, her spelling device nearby for she could
not speak once the tongue had lost its twin half.
Oddly she still had her olfactory sense and found
the smell of food cooking nauseating.
They sat and rubbed her shoulders, cooing
the comfort of small talk, attentive to the moment
when some important word or phrase
might announce itself, attentive to her breath.
She reached for her board and spelled
“eating cherries” before the end.
He said he wasn’t eating cherries but she
spelled again and spelled “I”—signaling some
delight with sweet fruit, the metaphor for a life
of ease and pleasure as she lay in a hospital bed
at the bottom of life’s sloping bowl.
That hard life of physical suffering
had become life’s proverbial bowl of cherries.
A true gift before dying.
Ruth Weinstein’s poetry has been appearing in various print and online journals since 2014. Her family history/memoir, Back to the Land: Alliance Colony to the Ozarks in Four Generations, was published in February 2020 by Stockton University Press. Ruth also works as a textile artist and, along with her husband, is an avid organic gardener on their 40-acre homestead in the Arkansas Ozarks.