She Will No Longer Take Her Food

Ron Charach
From:   The New England Journal of Medicine. August 9, 1979, Vol. 30.

She will no longer take her food.
—She, the perfect eater in the family
to suddenly turn this bad.
Tomorrow, the Doctor threatened
they'll feed her through a tube,
or she'll just have to take her food by vein.

Today is September 4; as I see it,
they have another month
because in mid-December our family goes to Nassau
— been going for years —
if her weight doesn't climb by October
we whisk her straight to The Mayo.
That she should end up like this — she,
the dearest, most accommodating little thing
on Earth.
She must know she's hurting us!

But the tube, though greased
would go down no further.
They reeled it out,
said they'd try again later
and her blue eyes glared; as they left
her mouth once rigid as a vise
formed a perfect 'O';
a siren pulling at her hair, and then
the overdetermined scream.

Poem 1 | Poem 2 | Poem 3 | Poem 4 | Poem 5 | Poem 6 | Poem 7 | Poem 8 | Poem 9 | Poem 10 | Poem 11 | Poem 12 | Poem 13 | Poem 14 | Poem 15 | Poem 16 | Poem 17 | Poem 18

Ron Charach's works copyright © to the author.