American Life in Poetry
We describe people we admire by throwing around words like “indomitable spirit,” but here’s an example and a proof by Don Welch, a Nebraska poet.
Shuffling Out Toward Morning
After an hour in the infusion lab,
Taxol dripping into her,
fighting her cancer;
after sitting nauseous
next to a man
vomiting into a Pepsi cup,
she rose, palming the wall,
stooping only to pick up
a pen a doctor had dropped,
giving it back to the doctor
who had slipped it poorly
into his coat.
Poem copyright 2013 by Don Welch, whose most recent book of poems is ”Gnomes” (Stephen F. Austin Univ. Press, 2013). Poem reprinted by permission of the author. American Life in Poetry is made possible by The Poetry Foundation and the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. We do not accept unsolicited manuscripts.