David Cobb

Woman, Dying

The wish to die and the will to live, her eyes beseeching me to wet her lips, her lips when wet beseeching me to ‘slip her something to be out of it all quick.’

These women, with their long, fighting deaths, gritting their toothless gums as a new morning forces itself in through the lattices of blinded wards, whiskery-chinned: they can teach a man something, something a man can’t learn from a man.

Maybe it’s their last pitiful act of mothering.

as she lies dying
I tell her the crocuses
are early this year . . .