~ Delta Poetry Review ~

The Wreckage of Science and Healing

Healing emerged from the magic mists moving

        In fields over herbs and flowers, black

        in the moonlight and fat with juices.

Those who practiced the old ways with spells

        passed their lore through the ages long

        before books bound their secrets into bundles.

Healers’ green-grown words turned to curse when stone-hearts

        decreed that science was a kingdom for men

        to train men to rule; healers were belittled and burned.

But my father, a doctor, never scolded this magic-hearted child when

        I fed the fairies little seeds I collected; never lectured when

        I sang hymns to the moon or talked to the trees.

My father the physician practiced both kinds of curing: science

        as his sword and shield, but healing as instinct,

        his magic of hearing the body speak—and replying.

He knew that something in the hand feels the same pain

        as something in the foot, that altered skin colors

        predict the body’s weather, that one should avoid

the liberal use of chemical compounds, unless nothing else

        will save you. When I was a barefoot wildling, a wooden shard

        pierced my leg from ankle to calf. After a surgeon removed it,

my father envisioned the wound held more and soaked it until two more inches

        of wood pushed out of my leg. Later, decades after, my father

        found out his beloved wife was full of cancer’s black pearls.

He and his skills had aged into hazy afternoons of Sundowners Syndrome.

        Nor could science craft medicine to save her. Such was his grief

        he told none of his family until she was gone, and he was more lost,

more broken than anyone could ever mend. We children took turns

        at his home in the Georgia backwoods he’d never leave.

        There we found a wreckage of healing, an impotence of science:

scores of boxes tucked throughout his house, full of bandages, dried iodine,

        yellowing gauze, expired ointments and moldered pills—mountains

        of desperate medicine, like my faded father, silent symbols of a

           sterile craft.

Mourning in Atlanta

      —1965

a woman’s husband is dying in Atlanta,

his heart broke, kind-eyed colleague

of my father at university medical school.

the woman and her husband live

in a rented house southwest of the city,

twice as far as our Dutch Colonial house

in a sprawled suburb of northeast Atlanta

from the university hospital—

where parameds took him,

after some discussion,

IDs and a phone call.

she’s staying with us in my little sister’s room,

so, my father insists, he can drive her straight

to the hospital doors on his route to work.

my mother arranges a paper bag of food

for her to take—the hospital cafeteria

will have nothing for her to buy.

when they back out of our garage,

she ducks down inside the big Buick,

hidden on the drive through our neighborhood.

I see her through my upstairs bedroom window—

her small red-scarfed head resting on the arm

of the passenger door, lit by hot Georgia sun.

she will wait invisible,

ghost at the bedside of her beloved husband,

amid machines, silent doctors and nurses

swishing past her with their opinions secret,

until her husband dies, the machines go silent,

and she calls my father

so he can talk doctor

to the doctor who ignores her.

when the woman and my father

left home the first day, my mother told me

if neighbors ask, just tell them

she’s our new housemaid.

did I tell you, America,

our guest is Black?

did I need to?

when her husband died, my father asked me

to go with him to the visitation at their home

miles and cultures across Atlanta from ours.

I stood there in a corner in a room full of food

and strangers side-eyeing, asking each other,

who’s the white girl? no one spoke to me,

I spoke to no one, except the new widow

whose hand I held a long moment, then retreated again,

an awkward 15-yr-old who had never been to a visitation,

a funeral, a household in mourning.

my father stood quiet behind the new widow

who swayed with grief. occasionally he steadied her,

cradling her elbow, a doctor attendant to the frailty

of a human body redolent with sadness,

knowing she must deliver herself through this

bleak passage, lifted by family and friends who love her.

then on our ride home, in the darkness along I-85,

we passed a blatant fire in the shape of a cross

filling the yard of a small house, men standing around it

in shirts and jeans, not hiding, not dousing a fire,

don’t look at them, my father said, don’t even look.

the civil rights act was a mere year old; the lynchers stood

framed by the hate they lit, too bold to wear sheets

on this Southern night that blanketed them

with heat, too arrogant to hide from flames’ light.

no one was safe                 no one

and now, what has changed? a white power cosplay

of sheets or flags still storms the streets with impunity.

BLM marches are hijacked by white radicals left and right,

interviews juke their hires, equal opportunities lie—

to wash white jobs whiter. mothers must warn their children

about police, about teachers, about shopping, about swimming—

because their children are Black—and I wonder, who will lead us

out of this desert? Where is the hand that will steady us,

deliver us through a passage beyond hate?