carcinoma

[toujours_nigel]

 The word hangs cigarette-smoke grey,

this habit he’s clutched close, coloured

the near-thirty years of my life,

half his life, half the life he lived

before I arrived with my part-

inheritance his mother’s smile.

 

She died of it. His father, too.

Growing up all my father’s jokes

were about not outliving them,

seeing fifty-five, retirement.

Last year they cut a tumour out

from beside his heart: and now this.

 

Can’t change people, or what they do.

My aunt’s voice, my mother’s, bitter

resignation coating their throats.

The sighing familiar tone:

how I love, eating cancerous

into their tolerant tissues.

Comments

[the_future_modernes]

Wow. This is so powerful. Very evocative.

[breathedout]

I was just thinking about my grandfather dying of lung cancer, & happened upon this. I love the last stanza in particular.

[greerwatson]

"Can’t change people, or what they do."

Too true.

This is very powerful in its sense of resignation—both to the medically inevitable and to the fact that there was no way (for anyone but the then-NOT-ill) to alter the initial cause of it.