Marjorie Moorhead
Long Term Survival
If I were to throw a stone
and watch the ripples go back, back,
through waters of some thirty years,
there you’d be.
Back a little further, and there you’d be, stronger.
Still full of life’s dramas; bursting with creativity.
No track marks mapping grief.
And I? Full-cheeked; rosy with naiveté.
Not yet ravaged by diseases preying on diminished immunity;
their treatments and their prevention.
Shaman now, conceding to ingestion of pills in a daily cluster,
I chant my spell of beseechment:
Take toxicity away; let there be harmony and balance in my Being.
Surviving, feet are in both places; light, and dark.
Having met Mortality in grisly proximity,
it rides along close, forever in the back pocket of Life,
and I know each morning as a gift others never got to open.
Marjorie Moorhead lives near the NH/VT border, where she writes about her surroundings and life on our troubled, beautiful Planet. She has work in two anthologies, many online poems of the day, and will have a chapbook out in May, 2019
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