Please Never Take my Boy
I’ll admit this much: when they said that you weren’t well (and Showing Signs)
I arrived to check on you,
and take your temperature,
and not look at your eye.
This latter: a plum some child had volleyed with a racquet, which surgeons once mashed back into socket. An irrelevant deformity.
I asked, what are the… what are the…? (and will admit in private unsettled by the thing).
They whimpered of your good eye: ‘He won’t look at the light. He’s hot. He won’t look at the light.’ Clear as life, now, yes, but I focused on your chest, shutting hacked out fruit from shot. I’ll admit this: I thought of your eye on my own boy, and that’s why I felt your forehead blindly. Hot enough.
Rest. Rest. Keep the curtains drawn. Soup. Make him soup… but he won’t look at the light…! but I was putting on my jacket.
You showed me your meningitis as a child shows his father a rock pool, and I accept that, and I wish I’d noticed it, and I accept the rashes found by colleagues when they covered your head with a standard blanket. I saw you at the hearing while the verdict seeped through
…preventable…
…rushed…
… grave malpractice….
Your good eye rested like a sniper on the courtroom balcony. It trained a red dot on my chest.
