Four Poems: two Odes, a Dramatic Poem and One Elegy

Cancer, Mother, Man and War


By Dennis L. Siluk


Ode to Cancer

I sensed the cancer
in her bones
in her bone marrow.
I know
it
will never cease; believe me,
the pain
reeks,
the cancer throbs, and stalks
in her bones
it pulsates
through her body, smothered
by pain.
She cries in those deep
moments
when she feels
the legs
of
the cancer creeping,
in its desolate tract,
seeping deeper
into her bones.
Here in her home
the entire
cancer phantom
speaks:
it has a
gasping
voice
a song of doom
and grief.

The tiniest
wave of the cancer
brings waves of pain to her
not only to her bone’s whiteness
but the inner floor of her
never-ending
once vigorous light.
Now the cancer phantom
has found routes
like rivers to the sea
her whole body:
thus, the smallest,
morsel, by each wave
has infected her
infinitely …!

No: 2507 10-28-2008; written in El Tambo, Huancayo, Peru
Dedicated to Florcita (Arnold’s Mother) by dlsiluk©2008


Ode to Mother

Mother brought me
this sole single life
which she knitted herself
with the help of Christ.
She knitted
with threads a
butterfly’s
cocoon,
out of
cotton and wool
and synthetic
materials;
with alpaca
she knitted
two arms so soft
like rabbits feet—
with them
she sawed
into two
wings—
that when I
arrived
feet first
these
heavenly wings
(feet and arms
and all such things)
they were
so handsome
I, I felt so
unworthy.

Nevertheless
the sharp temptation
to fly
was in my eyes,
so I saved these
wings
as schoolboys
keep
worms and bees,
grasshoppers
and so many
sacred things
until I got old,
put them into
a golden rimmed
bowel
and traveled the world.

I tried to resist
the mad impulse
to put it off
like retired explorers
in the jungles
and deserts
I’ve read in so
many old books
(now sitting idle on wooden
shelves…)—
but I never could
stop
traveling or reading,
I just spread it out
like pages
in those old book
still sitting on those
old wooden shelves.

The moral
of this ode is this:
the mother has
twice the beauty
when she knits.


No: 2508 10-29-2008; written in El Tambo, Huancayo, Peru by dlsiluk©2008
Dedicated to Mothers who knit dlsiluk©2008 Dedicated to E. T. Siluk


The Man Fish
(a Dramatic Poem)

“What is he waiting for?” she asked me.
“For time, simply for time,” I replied.
“I studied him like an ocean lobster,” she cried,
“until I grew algae in my eyes!”
And I replied, “I know this,” and added,
“I tell you, he is waiting for time.”
“He is like a thread in the water of
a deep lagoon!” she sighed.
And I replied, “The depth of man is
deeper than sand, and if you look deep
you will find, he is full of light, human
eyes, but dead in the darkness, if given
a dilemma, or worthless sigh!”
And she questioned, “I don’t understand,
how can this be, I’ve been so unpleased?”
And I replied once more, “In your net
one night, like a fish trapped,
you caught him, by your whim,
and thought you could change him.”

No: 2508 10-29-2008 by dlsiluk©2008

The Heartless:
An Elegy for the American Soldier
At War

The heart grew white with
patriotism, dark with anxiety
for war: yet he went even so.
“Oh death be mine for
liberty,” he cried as the
white clouds grew gray
with blood and disease
and dust and dirt in an
evening under small
arms fire, and rockets:
a slaughterhouse of rotten
meat, and guts lying here
and there, everywhere;
a horrible day for freedom.

The white dove of the morning
brought forgiveness for the
living, who did the killing.
So dark was the clergy, with
a voice of trumpets, and a soaked
flag with dark red blood.

Here and there, and everywhere,
soldiers smoking in wild despair,
all their days of goodness, and
decency, dignity, and nobility
now in dark shaped halls— of
pale moons, and nightly storms
in their minds: there somewhere,
is a steep ladder they now must climb:
oh where is the heart, for the heartless
for our snowy cold leaders, in soft
linen beds, in Washington?

No: 2508, 10-29-2008 by dlsiluk©2008
Dedicated to the American Soldiers in Afghanistan and Iraq