A friend of mine is a medical social worker for a hospice. For those of you who don’t know what a hospice is, it is an organization that takes care of people who probably have 6 months or less to live due to disease or health status. This is a poem my friend wrote…..
To Be of Service:
We are called to this work
By interior voices,
The gentle, nagging kind
That inhabit a conscience
And a life. Something
In the weight of a wife’s
Grief, the shape of a patient’s
Smile, bedbound and incontinent,
Lifts us to this routine
Where empathy and compassion
Fly in the face of the body
Politic. Here is no place
To be polarized, everyone’s
Death has equal footing
And no one God speaks for all.
This becomes a prayer
To be of service outside the Self
As if we watched our tenders
Like astronauts circling, witnessing
This fragile cradle of blue
Always suspended in balance.
We know the sacred
Is real, makes use of us, carrying
The voyagers through
The way a road leads home, or
A heart.
Written by Roby Newman 11/21-22/04.
May you be blessed Roby and those who do this type of service.