The Hospital Bed

Poetry by Omar Sabbagh
Photo by Alyssa Hurley

So much more than a bunch of bones, waning flesh,
the white-robed bed does its most to bear my father.

Can it carry the weight? Can its white-long caress
keep him warm with a warmth that answers
that one-souled question no one man is used to?
Will these tousled sheets, shod rough, prove their proof,
turn equal to the living that lives in a beating wish?
Because history for him is a mere and slumming word
and each soft feeling he bares is due, owned, earned
between a valiant dawn and a now well-loved dusk.

And I, his child, so full of bleeding questions, ask
now the one true and bloodless question that’s left
to ask. If love in truth can be carried into love?
If self, tethered to its other, is more than slipping sand
lost, dispersed, frittered between a few lifted fingers?
Bedside, I ask such things, then speak-out till I’m daft
with unsolved need. Can it carry the weight? Can it?
It can, it responds. It can. Though the augurs cuss and rot.

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