Poetry Monday: Dear Samuel

News has come of a dear friend suddenly, incomprehensibly no longer with us and in the gasping grief of it all, it seems fitting that today is Poetry Monday and this was the poem I had planned.

Know that you are loved.

DEAR SAMUEL, by Manuel Camacho, previously published in Yellow Chair Review

I will love you forever

Your brother saw you
Or did he see Death?
He stared into that dark empty
Room whimpering scared, scared

The next day they told us
Your heart had stopped
You were floating inside
Your mother, loose weed
In a fish bowl
Her cervix the dirt
Above your coffin

She and I held hands
Through a Hades of beige
Halls and white laser lights above
To watch you born
A floppy salamander
The clammy skin, the squishy chest
Startlingly hard bones
The bud of your penis, the open
Mouth, your little tongue

The placenta that failed
You picked apart, immortalized
In the literature, your mother as well
A curious case! 300 AFP!
And I’m another father
Of a child like you
Initiate to that grim fellowship

Where is God? God has a reason
That’s what people want to say
God was your mother
Wrapped with me in the shower
Her head at my back as I wept
Into the sink.

----

Love and strength,
Esss