[Critique Group 1] Sally's December submission

[Sally Rosenthal]

THICKER THAN WATER

 

 

 

My brother is seventy.

How can this be?

 

 

How did the toddler gazing

With wonder at Santa Claus

In a treasured photograph

Become an old man himself?

 

 

What happened to the young boy 

Who bought me popsicles when

Other children refused to play

With a little girl wearing

Leg braces, thick glasses, and a hopeful smile?

 

 

Why did he grow angry and bitter

And turn his back on the family who loved him?  

What happened to him in middle age

That literally broke his heart? 

 

 

Two decades of surgeries and stents have failed

To put his Humpty Dumpty heart together again.

Rejected for a trial of an 

Experimental Life-saving drug,

He, in his mortality,  faces an uncertain future.

 

 

My brother is seventy,

And my own heart breaks knowing

He might not  reach seventy-one.

 

 

                                                            By Sally
Rosenthal

 

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