A friend of mine recently sent this poem. It is a response to his wife’s recent run-in with cancer. He gave me permission to post it here.
Boobs
It is certainly not that I hate boobs, I consider
my reaction to them appropriately male and definitely
within the parameters of normal. I enjoy, like most men,
their usual state of coverage as it feeds my imagination
and consider catching a glimpse of them
through a cracked door, or in a mirror as my wife changes a guilty secret, though she has never been
anything less than gratuitous with them.
But today I don’t know what to think. Today I am
forced to look at her bosoms out of the side of my eyes
and consider, could they really kill her? I am certainly
accustomed to thinking about them, but the extent to which
they hold my attention now is not even rivaled by the days
that followed my first glimpses of them, when they were paired
with such intense kissing and fondling that my jaw was sore, and
my classwork ignored.
These are the same boobs aren’t they. The same ones that
swelled to nearly twice their size to sate my infant son’s thirst.
The same tits that sat through endless feedings and pumping,
sore and cracked to give nourishment, surely these are not the same
breasts that filled out her little shirts perfectly and on many occasions
slid perfectly out from underneath silken lingerie to turn my eyes as light
as the moon.
Three needles, it took three needles to pierce the little devil in her breast,
wrapped tightly in its cocoon of dense bundled tissue. Three needles of increasing
gauge each inserted into the tender skin just south and west of her nipple, before
it would release its internal poison for study, no results yet but I have never known
anything to guard a secret so selfishly unless it truly had something to hide. Four days,
they told us, it would take Pathology four days to unravel the secrets in that cloudy,
blood tinged vial, four days until we can tell you whether or not to rejoice or get your
life in order, they’d call us on Tuesday.
Very powerful. Thank you for sharing this.