Thursday, May 22, 2014

Breaking Branches

I have returned to take Aunt Vicki to the place she will likely die.
Home where I spread thin my youth has become bitter with death.
I don’t know how my brother can live here.
The old woman comes quiet as a saint.
The day wears on, we begin to stretch taut nerves.
She decides it is time to go home –
there is too much light coming through the window.
The nurse pulls the curtain around Vicki’s bed,
finally it is dark enough, she is safe from a ravenous sun.
When the doctor comes in she suggests sleep would be best
perhaps a pill will help the patient rest through the night.
Under a shattered sky
we live between thin layers of light and dark
asleep and awake, beginning and end.
An empty halo drifts above my ghost of a skull.
Time is a tree and all our lives breaking branches.

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Is there pathetic fallacy in this poem?
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