We craft word-coffins for our inner necessity,
holding our parents’ hands in hospice quiet;
questions of loss and grief are not asked
as time embezzles riches from us all.
Racing against the morphine drip,
we swear to respect their inconvenient wishes.
We wonder if our gift of flowers consoles them,
too late perhaps, naïve in our hope.
But why are they still blind to our brother’s thefts and abuses?
No ransom for the cruel kidnapping of disease;
days priceless, grief without end,
yet poorer, we turn to leave dissatisfied,
counting our own lives without answer.
Why are they bankrupt of plausible, even cheap excuses?
Frederick Wilbur’s poetry collections are As Pus Floats the Splinter Out, Conjugation of Perhaps and forthcoming, The Heft of Promise. He is poetry co-editor and blogger for Streetlight Magazine. He was awarded the Stephen Meats Poetry Prize for best poem of the year by Midwest Quarterly (2018).
