Mom's End Poem by Egbert Simcox

Mom’s End


Hurrying metal embraces flesh

Fierce energy imparted in the kiss.

Ragdoll body pinwheels and tumbles

Then stillness on the uncaring asphalt.

Sentience and warmth erased,

Now a mound of cooling, fleshy wreckage,

Like a stricken doe,

Caricature of limp and tangled limbs,

Glazing eyes, neck and head absurdly skewed

I witness through a child’s eyes,

Then I hide within me, as I have since,

From guilt, shame, horror and engulfing grief.

This is no reality I can ever own or acknowledge

Her glowing vitality now flung along the road

A dimming ember arcing to cold ash and exit,

Like the fading gleam of fireflies smeared upon the sidewalk.

These obscene moments nightly return unbidden.

On the absent, intubated woman at the end,

Then and now, I could not look,

Could not assimilate this absurd finality.

Where do the comatose go in that twilight of theirs?

Was she hiding and watching from her shattered temple

In those hours before death was officially sealed,

Was there room inside that crushed skull for a reassuring God, .

For repentance, for vows renewed, or for forgiving me?

Or was she silently rejoicing her release from life’s absent love?

I fled her deathbed lest her mortality swallow me as well,

And those attending her bier reproach me as the death-dealer,

The imprudent, uncaring upstart who helped close out her life.

I hid then, as I have since hidden within my shrunken self,

Hidden from the certain transience of all that we cherish,

From pain, shock and the nearness of ever hovering loss.

Nowadays, they would deem me hypervigilant.

Indeed I am.`

Hiding for safety in all my remaining decades.

Hiding from the lurking menaces of intimacy, rejection, conflict.

Hiding even from things benign: candor, competition, sharing.

For all – all will expose my withered, insubstantial self,

Fatally expose my consuming cowardice and guilt

As I mutely serve my time.



December 2,2013



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