The Suffering We Are... Poem by Frank Bana

I’m only looking to post this mail
I don’t know if it will get through
To the hostel where you daily seek a kind of health

And stumbling to my hill
I can’t ensure a forward path
To hospitals where they will seek to call you ill

It isn’t clear
That you aren’t horizontal, flat or broke –
Or lucky with the government, provision for the unemployed

There’s not been a cough or word
Since we cooked and laughed in Coventry
And you told me how your mother said that you should marry me

I only have discovered
In this brief and frothing brew of my affection
A little aphoristic pill that puts us sane above the rest:

It would be cynical to cure
All the suffering we are, to contain
The pain we see, with art, of any quality.