Upon Hearing the News of Your Leukemia
All day I listened to the trees sway
and the crows call in winter.
All day I watched the grey metallic light of autumn
spread its shroud over the earth.
Once or twice near noon I watched the last
of the summer butterflies flit past.
Part of me wanted to fly—join them, to migrate south,
but we can’t all travel to the land of bougainvillea and magnolia.
Meanwhile, you lie on a hospital bed in Seattle;
chemo pulsing through your blood.
What can I offer you? This rush of jabbering crows,
and the leaves transformed this week into a gaudy orange?
Or the last of the summer tomatoes, vibrant & tenacious
as they raise their heads toward a bone-colored sky?
• • •
Doris Jean Lynch’s first full book of poems, Swimming to Alaska, was published in 2023 by Bottom Dog Press. Her collection of haibun Meteor Hound also came out that year. She has won awards from the Poetry Society of America, Indiana Arts Council, Alaskan Council on the Arts, Chester H. Jones Foundation, and Haiku Society of America, among others. She also writes and publishes many haiku and haibun. In her twenties she spent a school year in the Inupiat village of Kivalina above the Arctic Circle, and seven more years in Juneau, Alaska, which she considers her spiritual home. After retiring as a public librarian, she spends her non-writing time hiking, taking photographs, walking her wild Labrador, Ronan, and avoiding house cleaning of all kinds.