fostering the humanistic practice of medicine publishing personal accounts of illness and healing encouraging health care advocacy

fostering the humanistic practice of medicine publishing personal accounts of illness and healing encouraging health care advocacy

Wet skin

My mother doesn’t think she’s dying,
but she’s in the ER for the third time
in less than three months while

I’m 2,500 miles away on an island
in the middle of the sea, my sister
sitting with our shrinking mother

as they wait for blood-test results again.
I see them on hard waiting-room seats,
my sister upright and patient,

our prickly mother restless and
ready for the soft sofa at home that
she has long preferred to her bed.

My sister and I think our mother
is dying from the outside in. She
insists that she’s recuperating.

I walk by the huge pool to see a
young mother bobbing in the water,
holding her baby, wet skin to wet skin,

as gray-tinged white clouds
scuttle overhead, moving fast
toward the sea.

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Jan Haag taught writing as a journalism/creative-writing professor in Sacramento, CA, for more than three decades. Now retired, she hosts writing workshops using the Amherst Writers & Artists method. She is the author of a poetry collection, Companion Spirit, and she has had stories and poems published in many anthologies and literary journals. She writes and posts daily poems on her website, janishaag.com.

About the Poem

“Five weeks before my mother died, I was on Kauai taking two poetry master classes from poets Billy Collins and Marie Howe. The beginnings of this poem emerged in Marie Howe’s class, prompted by texts from my sister, who was sitting with our mother in a hospital in Northern California, and by seeing a young mother and baby in the pool at the hotel where the classes were held.”

Comments

5 thoughts on “Wet skin”

  1. Jan- I love the contrast in the last lines w your sister’s presence w your mother. Clouds drifting (as they inevitably do) to the sea makes a fresh metaphor for your mom’s (and thus everyone’s, especially felt when Mom is elderly) life drifting in it’s own time to what will be.
    I’m in this w my mom (100), too-she’s living w me now. I’m glad you included tge reference to the Amherst Method- I looked it up & will sign up for their amazingly affordable workshops. Best wishes.

  2. Tiger Tiger, Burning Bright

    Just saying you were taking poetry classes while your mom was in the ER for the third time, and you thought she might be dying – but didn’t go back – leaves a big hole in the poem.

    The reader’s left wondering: what did you do?

    If you did go back, then take us there. Let the poem end with you heading to the airport, sitting on the plane, walking into the hospital – something that shows us you moved.

    If you didn’t go back, we need to know why.
    Was it because you thought she’d be okay?
    Or were things strained between you two – too much history, too much pain?

    Whatever the truth is, say it plain. That’s what will make the poem hit home.

    1. Interesting comment/critique. I also write in-the-moment (nf not often poetry). I like it that Jan just leaves it at that she was far away. It happens. Maybe there will be another poem about the parts omitted for brevity and the poignant of the moments capture.

  3. Another beautiful poem –
    “my mother doesn’t think she’s dying”
    “our prickly mother”
    thanks Jan

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