Solace, in Verse

In the early hours of 23 March 2023, about 12 hours before our treasured 12-year-old son died from a rare form of brain cancer, I climbed into his bed at Shaare Zedek Medical Center in Jerusalem, wrapped him in my arms and recited the poem Jabberwocky:

“ ’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves 

Did gyre and gimble in the wabe …”

My child was no longer conscious, but I hoped and believed that he could sense my presence, and that my voice would comfort him and soothe his furiously beating heart. My son had learnt the words to Lewis Carroll’s nonsense poem by listening to me recite it to him and his twin sister at bedtime. A brave, bright, imaginative, optimistic boy, he loved the drama of the poem and the courage of the “beamish boy” as, with his “vorpal sword” in hand, he defeats his “manxome foe.”

My son was also a passionate reader. But toward the end of a year punctured by surgeries, rounds of radiation, hospitalizations and medications, it was harder for him to focus. Instead, I would sit beside his hospital bed and read aloud to him, mostly Richmal Crompton’s Just William stories.

One evening in the hospital in mid-February, I read him some of my favourite poems—poems that my mother had read to me as a child. Cargoes by John Masefield (“Quinquireme of Nineveh from distant Ophir / Rowing home to haven in sunny Palestine”) and a Shakespeare sonnet (“When, in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes”). He listened, rapt and smiling. Then we talked about the meaning of the poems.

A few days later, I started my own poetry group on WhatsApp, calling it Poetry Is Medicine, and invited friends to join. I had found, during earlier crises, that the rhythm of poetry can soothe my anxieties. With just a word or a phrase, a poem can reach the hidden places that prayers or well-meaning advice cannot. 

The poems offered an anchor to me during unpredictable and painful times. In a calm interlude each day, I searched in my anthologies and on sites such as Poetry Daily for the ‘right’ poem to share. The ‘right’ poem could be about almost anything: an apple tree, an insect, a pie, a miracle.

Some were classics: Everyone Sang, by Siegfried Sassoon; A Modest Love, by Sir Edward Dyer (“The lowest trees have tops, the ant her gall”); one, a psalm: “The Lord to me a shepherd is, want therefore shall not I.”

People responded with heart emojis and their own favourites. My mother shared Shakespeare soliloquies: “We had to learn chunks by heart,” she wrote. My sister and I exchanged messages about the poems of R. S. Thomas, which we had studied in school, recalling one that begins “All right, I was Welsh: Does it matter?”

Friends contributed. One sent Chinese Foot Chart, by Kay Ryan: “Look, / boats of mercy / embark from / our heart at the / oddest knock.” Another friend carefully translated the Hebrew poem Apple of Imperfection, by Varda Genossar: “First speech is the speech of love … last speech, silence.”

The poems took on a life of their own. Friends shared them with their friends, saying that the verses added joy to their day. “The poems that you send express in words feelings that I have no ability to express,” my friend Marilyn wrote. One old school friend bought new collections, telling me: “It’s been years (actually decades) since I’ve read poetry, but you have rekindled an ­interest!”

At 9:22 a.m. on 23 March 2023, I shared the poem Jabberwocky with my WhatsApp group. My son’s heart stopped beating 3½ hours later, as I held his hand and sang to him. For our family, my husband, our daughter, his loss is a catastrophe. The space that our son had filled with his loving nature, his exuberance, his magical smile, his luminous observations and his laughter was replaced by a gigantic empty hole. I stopped posting poems.

Then my friend Leyla sent me Late Fragment, Raymond Carver’s last published poem: “And what did you want? / To call myself beloved, to feel myself / beloved on the earth.”

It offered me some small comfort, because I knew that even in my son’s darkest hours, he was always loved—and still is—and was never for a moment alone. I shared Late Fragment with my poetry group, and I began, again, to share poems and songs. One was Taking Care, by Callista Buchen: “I sit with my grief. I mother it. I hold its small, hot hand. I don’t say, shhh.” Another was Theme in Yellow (the title contains my son’s favourite, “cheerful” colour), by Carl Sandburg: “When dusk is fallen / Children join hands / And circle round me / Singing ghost songs.” 

Friends posted yellow heart emojis; they added comments, quoted favourite lines. I felt loved and supported. And I was able to get up in the morning and take care of my daughter, who has lost her twin and only sibling, from whom she had never been apart.

Seven weeks before my son died, we had celebrated our daughter’s bat mitzvah. In synagogue, she read beautifully from the Torah portion of Beshalach, in which the Israelites, fleeing slavery in Egypt, cross the Red Sea on dry land, as “the waters formed a wall for them on their right hand and on their left.” Itself a beautiful poem, it reflected my feelings: that our community had formed strong walls around us, supporting us at every step of our gruelling journey.

Perhaps that’s why the poem that is most meaningful to me is Moisés, or Moses, by Luis Alberto de Cuenca, translated from Spanish by Gustavo Pérez Firmat. On the eighth day after my son died, I read it aloud beside his grave. 

"Give me your hand. 

We have to cross the river and my strength fails me.

Hold me as if I were an abandoned package in a wicker basket, a lump that moves and cries in the twilight.

Cross the river with me. Even if this time the waters don’t part before us.

Even if this time God doesn’t come to our aid and a flurry of arrows riddles our backs.

Even if there is no river."

From The Washington Post (24 May 2023) © 2023 Josie Glausiusz.