Here’s a first for EDIWTB.
I get The Writer’s Almanac from NPR every day via email. Each installment features a poem. I have noticed that the editors sometimes run poems that they ran the year before, which always disappoints me a little bit. But I remember this poem from last year and when it came up again a few days ago, I was glad to see it. I find it so moving.
I thought I would share it here.
Poem: "A Boy in a Bed in the Dark" by Brad Sachs, from In the Desperate Kingdom of Love: Poems 2001-2004. © Chestnut Hills Press, 2004. Reprinted with permission.
A Boy in a Bed in the Dark
Born with a cleft palate,
My two-year-old brother,
Recovering from yet another surgery,
Toddled into our bedroom
Toppled a tower of blocks
That I had patiently built
And in a five-year-old’s fury
I grabbed a fallen block
And winged it at him
Ripping open his carefully reconstructed lip.
The next hours were gruesomely compressed
Ending with a boy in a bed in the dark
Mute with fear
Staring out into the hallway with horror
As the pediatrician went in and out of the bathroom
With one vast blood-soaked towel after another
Shaking his head worriedly.
My brother’s howls
And my parents’ cooed comfort
Became the soundtrack to this milky movie
That plays
In my darkest theatre,
The one that I sidle past each night
With a shudder
And a throb in my fist