Eight Months

Yesterday eight months since they pulled the plug

On you, four days after God said “come” or

You said “enough,” thus ending a life full

As any ten, rich as the Amber Room,

Varied as an island sky or the Gotham

Faces you loved to watch and study.

(Are you watching them still?)

                                                  Eight months for me

To learn how to digest the bitter gruel

Of loss, absence, emptiness—not so much

A substance as a void, a dark hole in

In the heart, longing to be filled, spirit rumbling

Around the hunger, slow starving in black

Vacuum, big-bellied like the pitiful

Children we never seem to solve—Biafra,

Bangladesh, Sudan, Somalia—maybe now

You know the reason why.

                                             Or big-bellied not

In starvation but in pregnancy, eight

Months into a nine-month term (is that the

Gestation there? here?), anxious to birth this

Baby of life beyond death, of something

More from the ashes of something less.

                                                                 What

Shall we name it, this child of your leaving?

Will you be there for the delivery?

Say “yes”—just once more.

.

“Yes.”