back to
poetry
index

Obit for Rose (1895-1991)
by Earl Coleman

Not even ten years old, stripped clean of father, scholarship, ways out, reduced to nubbin, hand-me-downs, worn soles, already mountains of her IOU’s piled high, she sentenced, booked herself in jail, without reprieve, a criminal deserving of her Fate.

By puberty she was wiped out and on the verge of bankruptcy, and in her Orchard Street cell/tenement gang-banged by poverty and Class, ratted on by family, betrayed by her own body and her steamy dreams.

She wed at nineteen, brought to child-bed by the loveless ravishing of Alien, the Other, Pod, got-in-beneath-her-radar raider suddenly appeared from out of hostile space to overrun her country and declare free will irrelevant.

Then did her time while brooding, breeding, feeding, all intruding on her only body, got at, sucked at, struck at, used, geared up to work with thimbles, fingers, pens that nimbly, for a penny each, would address envelopes, while bosses, husband, brother, sons

pressed their demands. At last grew old from living in the life, long in the tooth, now sagged and bagged beneath the eyes which rained with milk, shut down, shut out what she could see, had seen, and then her legs went and her spleen and then

her bowel and her spine which bent, and then her diabetes got her toes which had to go, because her flow of blood could bring itself to circulate no more than she, no longer anywhere to go, to ambulate the city street to buy a loaf of bread, or walk away,

or even walk among the living if they hadn’t died, although most had, until a palsy planted its deliverance - its liberating stroke to set her free.

Oh grave.