The old blow hole, gas chamber, tail pipe,

The house of innocents smitten in the round house

Like a big wind full of blinding snow,

Biting our eyes with the temerity to say so,

Termites at the foundation,

Call me to you as we dissolve away

Like salt in warm water on the stove.

The grave diggers warm their hands

And some come away with money.

What of us who lost the precious sheep,

The one and only me that I knew so well,

Like a bowl, a sentence, a look

Between people at parting

With feelings so full as to effervesce

Like the lid off a pop and we fizz before going silent and flat

And really missing what we could never quite conceive,

Relieved of belief in anything,

Roaming as the ghost of what we knew and now know

Only in the hollow of its absence,

In the fullness of some place never erased

Like eternity holding our most pathetic degradations

As if all time and all of the animals had to hatch

To make it so or make us think so,

Like the poles of the barbed wire fence

Stretching toward the horizon of a Wyoming plain,

So full of life at night

As to hold all moments, all words,

All doubts in the stillness.

By Rolf Stavig

11/09/2022  Writing with Cancer Group