CHEMOTHERAPY Poem by Harkaitz Cano

There is only one thing more depressing
than a hospital
and it's not a cemetery
but a bus full of people
on the regular line to the hospital.
Those people, each with his x-ray under his arm
in an envelope, gaze
lost
in a deep pool that neither you nor I will ever be able to see.
The cradle-smile of a six-year-old in chemotherapy
rends the heart.
Old people holding their x-rays to the light of the window,
‘look: it's that white spot there', they proclaim
joyfully,
and especially those two women you hear talking
over Nine Inch Nails on your walkman,
words
that struggle to scale the cliff of yesterday's tears.
‘You'll see', I tell my husband,
‘you'll see what walks we'll take, the two of us,
when they bring us the wheelchair.
They'll call us Coyote and Roadrunner, Ishmael'.
Coyote and Roadrunner.
I shiver when I hear that,
and then the brave woman adds that the paralysis
has extended to his left hand or maybe to the right.
Each one with his x-ray under his arm,
his quota of cancer, his
abandonment, his glass
eye or his orthopedic glove.
If that doesn't rend the heart
let them incinerate us until the air becomes an axe.
Ishmael awaits our breath.
We can imagine it:
Ishmael, a person still but perhaps with little time,
playing chess on top of the Scottish blanket
that covers his knees,
sometimes sighing, sometimes smiling,
a person still, Ishmael,
life but not still.
‘Coyote and Roadrunner, pray as hard as you can.
You'll see
how things are when they bring us the wheelchair'.