Contributor Series 9: If Men Had Ears
Feeding Nancy
By Paul Hostovsky
By Paul Hostovsky
She was my favorite
sign language teacher, the one
with the gentlest
patience, her long intelligent fingers
never tiring
of song, of listening for song the way
a hand listens
for the rain. I have come
to feed her dinner tonight in the hospital bed
they’ve set up in her home,
and to mourn the death of her beautiful
eloquent hands
lying heavy and cruel now as poached
game at the feet
of the heartbroken girl
who taught those birds how to talk
and sing–
This is crueler than Beethoven going deaf,
the loss
of the music of these birds.
It wasn’t
enough that her teachers
at the school for the deaf punished the birds
for singing,
whacked them with a ruler, locked them up
and let them starve–
little cages of bone inside a cage–
till her friends sprung them
and they were happy,
happy at last to be among their own,
and they couldn’t
stop talking, and they couldn’t stop singing,
because this
is the most beautiful singing the world has ever seen.
But then she got sick, she
got MS. And her hands stopped
talking, stopped singing, stopped flying.
They lie motionless at her side now
as she opens her mouth for another
spoonful of rice.
O orphaned, ravenous, dying
baby bird mouth.
Paul Hostovsky’s most recent to appear here was Fledgling, published in January 2011 as 4th runner-up in the First-Ever vox poetica Poetry Contest.
Fabulous!! This is one of the best that has been posted.
Beautiful!