Terminal by Ronald Moran

Too late for me to say to my terminally ill
                         friends,
I hope you feel better soon, when I know
                         they will
not get well, and if they could still respond,
                         they might

want to say, It's Ok, Ron, we are ready,                         
                         a chorus
joining others in that final stage when
                         every
breath comes only in forty second cycles,
                         and

I don't know what I should hope for next:
                         another breath
or cessation, their eyes fixed at either open
                         or partially
closed, never all the way, as if to declare,
                         We tried.



Ronald Moran lives in Simpsonville, South Carolina. His poems have been published in Asheville Poetry Review, Commonweal, Connecticut Poetry Review, Louisiana Review, Maryland Poetry Review, Negative Capability, North American Review, Northwest Review, South Carolina Review, Southern Review, Tar River Poetry, The Wallace Stevens Journal, and in thirteen books/chapbooks of poetry. Clemson University Press published his Eye of the World in the spring of this year.