While you lay cloistered
Time passed by.
You would'ave hated it:
The 60's, with its radicals,
hippies and civil rights activists
Nearly killed your Victorian Right Wing
sensibilities. But to see the
passing on to Glory of your father,
who loved you too much to visit you,
and To see your aunt and uncle become
Bible-Belted Maniacs who
in utter ignorance of modern medicine,
prayed daily for your release from
Satan's Clutches.
Your wife, an umbilicus,
brings nourishment for your soul:
Music, flowers on holidays, sweets
when you could still eat them.  Long
ago, she ceased bringing you
news about the children, whose lives
had gone on without you.  You seemed to
prefer the beleif that things
did not go on without you, that
if you peeked outside your room
it would be sometime, Summer
1940's or 50's, and you would be
Young and Life would stretch out
before you like an unmarked country road,
wet and cool in the early morning.

---Ruth Lance, poem to my dad who was a PHD in a
nursing home for 11 years
 

Slaying The Dragon Poetry