The Aged Gemini

(Senior Poet Laureate Award of the Amy Kitchener's Angels Without Wings Foundation, 2007)

Eighty-seven years old yesterday
she is drugged to delirium
to diminish discomfort
of long months in hospital

Her words slur into the receiver
of an overseas telephone call
which does not reassure
while memories of a jet-propelled woman
juxtapose on present reality

Four months ago she was like a person of thirty,
everywhere – doing it all,
Ms. Mercury – the best advertisement
for her birth sign any astrologer
could ever devise

She never stopped, never rested
Once and for many years,
a three a.m. paper route
and work that same day,
with a husband equally driven,
chattering together
arguing forever, never listening to the other

He lived years longer than expected,
broke a record, after fatal malady
wheel-chaired him
because she willed this, battled it,
with the energy of an army,
and so, paralyzed, voiceless,
he continued to live

After he died
a new man friend replaced him
matter-of-factly and almost immediately,
a dynamo driver, they traveled all over,
visiting friends whose numbers
were diminishing too quickly,
an augur they ignored

Her life had been kind
she was too busy chattering,
running, doing, to ever consider
it could have been otherwise

Now, children scattered
man-friend beside her bedside,
death sitting on the other side, trying to decide
if this once Amazon-woman is going to survive
or is ready to die

Because if he takes her now
and it is a mistake
she'll make him pay for it for eternity

And so he waits

© 6.2007 Helen Bar-Lev