I must confess that I never (well, hardly ever) read poetry. However, that said, this might be my favorite poem ever. My dear friend, Jane Ulrich, wrote this today and it confirms my admiration for her, this mom who is also a daughter.
Situation Normal
Jane Ulrich
We cook the eggs poorly, buy the wrong food,
don't answer the bellowed demands from the bedroom fast enough,
tap dancing as fast as we can to please the old man,
to do something right, to make the unbearable weeks bearable.
Old bastard, now more what he always was, except dying.
Stiffening out. Going pork. Feet up.
He's exiting with a big splash, the way he's done everything,
bigger than anybody. No docile passing away for this one.
No soft dying down..
No mild withdrawal.
No going gentle into this good night.
Even at 91, shrunken, shuffling with the walker, he looms
over his own demise roaring in rage, maddened in this ultimate snafu,
the bone cancer just another winter in France into Germany in 1944, fucking Nazis,
just another fist in the other corner of the ring
for the Middleweight Champion of the South Pacific.
Not for him the old man grumbling in his chair over the hardness of the soft boiled egg,
but First Sergeant in a deranged army to Command with Authority,
his grown children the enemy aimed at him, nothing more.
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