With the Dying

Beret was one of the volunteers working in the first few years of the Project at Laguna Honda Hospital. A poet, this is how she describes what it was like for her on the ward.

“The words spoken here are
dust –laden clouds
over fields of rice, the rain will pour
over these hospital beds as the
last words
sink down and are found.
Some days the ward looks like a village
in the season of monsoon.  They are
leaving us
on both sides of the corridor,
the old woman
whose head is sprouting lumps of cancer
like shiny, all-knowing eyes.
I come to rub their feet
like a granddaughter
or a good sister.
I hold their hands and tell them
we are all worthy of this one thing,
we are all deserving and
able to die.
I come to learn what they teach
about love
-- that it must forget itself,
must belong wholly to the beloved
and the needs of the beloved,
the muscles aching to be stroked,
the naming of the beautiful
in every mutant form.”