OREN DYING
Oren, at the end of eighty winters,
head swollen from lung cancer like an old pumpkin,
struggles disoriented in his last bed,
hollers loudly and constantly Ma, Ma.
MA: virgin word of cowboys and Indians,
mother, meter, some sort of gauge or compass
for this measureless world tumbling like moonblood
to the first full moon of almost spring.
MA: with no more voice than a sheep has,
dying, he does not know enough to ask
why this last night is different from mothernights,
who was sacrificed for him at the feast of light.
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Author:
Robert Southwick Richmond (
Offline) - Published: December 23rd, 2020 15:40
- Comment from author about the poem: When I did the autopsy on this elderly smoker about 35 years ago, I found the line "hollers loudly and constantly Ma, Ma" in the nurses' notes about his last days, and it became the une ligne donnée (Paul Valéry's "the one line you're given") of this poem. I first imagine Ma as the ancient Indo-European Urwort from which derive first mother, then measure and meter, then moon, and many more. Then Ma becomes the bleat of a sheep, and then the Hebrew word for why? as in the opening formula of the Passover seder, Ma nishtanna? Why is this night different from all other nights?
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Comments2
He probably wouldn't have known about 'Ma' as you have explained here. Maybe he simply meant 'Mother'?
For either, or both, of these reasons, it's a dark, horrendous state described here, I think.
One dying, pitiful, a terrible scourge of smoking.
Oren wouldn't have known any of those things. That hospital was in rural Appalachia, and most of our patients were dirt-poor rural workers who'd seen action in WW 2. I think of him speaking out of Jungian collective unconscious.
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