Another poem

I've been busy, certainly. My work is daily contact with sickness, pain, death, and grief. It's work that I've chosen to do, that I've sought out and been educated for, that I actively engage with.

I haven't shared any specifics yet, either from my current practice or from past encounters. I very much want to, and I'm going to find ways to do so that are consistent with ethics and the law.

I just don't know what those best ways are right now.

In the meantime, here's another image and poem:

Theresa Seeley is comforted by a friend as she clutches the American flag presented to her at the burial of her son, U.S. Army Sgt. Michael Seeley, in St. Anthony's Cemetery in Fredericton, New Brunswick, Canada, Thursday, Nov. 9, 2006. Seeley, a member of the Mi'Kmaq First Nation, was killed in a bomb attack on Oct. 30 while on duty with the U.S. Army in Iraq.

(AP Photo/Andrew Vaughan, CP)

Evening
by Gail Mazur

Sometimes she's Confucian--
resolute in privation. . . .

Each day, more immobile,
hip not mending, legs swollen;

still she carries her grief
with a hard steadiness.

Twelve years uncompanioned,
there's no point longing for

what can't return. This morning,
she tells me, she found a robin

hunched in the damp dirt
by the blossoming white azalea.

Still there at noon--
she went out in the yard

with her 4-pronged metal cane--
it appeared to be dying.

Tonight, when she looked again,
the bird had disappeared and

in its place, under the bush,
was a tiny egg--

"Beautiful robin's-egg blue"--
she carried carefully indoors.

"Are you keeping it warm?"
I ask--what am I thinking?--

And she: "Gail, I don't want
a bird, I want a blue egg."
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