When the sky falls
It falls directly above me
Chunks of space left above me
An empty howling nothing that shouldn’t be there
•
An empty howling nothing
Pulling and waiting
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Fissures fracture across the blue like fault lines on the ground
Foreshadowing where the next piece may fall
•
Sky falls when you hear the words
You have cancer
•
Lots of sky falls
•
Scans confirm it’s already metastatic
Another piece plummets
So much information
Type, subtype, hormone receptor, Her2Neu
Each a piece of forever lost sky
•
Cancer words hurl pieces of sky
To the ground in a show of gravity and force
Grades, mutations, invasive, lobular, ductal
More pieces
Stages
Chemotherapy
Lymph nodes
Trials
Genetics
Genomics
Treatments
•
Survival benefit
•
Bigger pieces fall
You barely notice because
Of the doom that distracts while closing in
Like a dark night of your soul
•
Metastatic
This piece hits like bricks
You’re never the same
Everything changes
Forever scarred
Inside and out
•
So many deaths
Each their own portion of fallen sky
Grandma, Mom, Pete, Jim, Becky, Susie,
Bobby, Karen, Marge, Kim, Lalay, Lindsay,
Meghan, Melissa, Heather, and so many others
•
Whose names do you remember?
Speak and give them voice
•
Irreplaceable sky fallen with each
Loss through death touches our souls forever
Like a shadow that never leaves
Or a coldness in the yellow warmth of sun
•
So many scans
Tiny tubes of skyless holes
Confining, enclosing, lifeless
•
Sky falls waiting for results
Slingshots take aim at clouds
We ourselves knock out chunks before we hear
News of regression, stability, or progression
Pieces of blue get patched and repaired with good news
And then fall again in bigger chunks with bad news
until they can’t be put back
Some things can’t be put back
Including the fallen sky
That won’t see sunrise or sunset again
•
Skies fall in countless ways
Some spoken and some silent
Skies drop cruelly with metastatic cancer
Piece by piece
Chunk by chunk
Section by section
Assaulting, assailing, and attacking
Erasing, eroding, and emptying more and more
Stealing, silencing, and stilling before our eyes
A persisting and prevailing powerlessness causing pain
For more than just the haver
•
Cancer kills
Murders
Slays
Massacres
•
Cancer carnage concealed in common language
Of either succumbing or statistics
•
What’s being done?
Where’s the urgency?
Why can’t it be solved?
When will all be saved?
How will we get there?
•
What’s being done is our voices
Speaking and shouting
More and more
We will be seen
And not silenced
•
More research slowly unfolds
More action and faces
More is needed
•
The urgency is the estimated 43,600 breast cancer deaths
For 2021 in the US
119 a day
Up 3 from last year
•
The answer is more resources and research
More advocacy, attention, and connections
Better treatments, more trials, more collaboration
Growing bigger one life at a time
•
I don’t know when all will be saved
I hope, I cry, I push, I pray
I keep going
I still don’t know
No one does
•
I don’t know how
But believe one day
Cancer will fall and be no more
Just like those pieces of falling sky
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The sky has always been one of my favorite things
The endless blues
The different hues
The starry nights
The paint of sunrises and sunsets
The clouds floating freely wherever the wind takes them.
Still moments and morphing shapes change before our eyes
•
My home is still under its dome
Hope is in the sky
Let’s keep our eyes steady on the hope
Of today and all our tomorrows
And not those pieces of sky that fall
They will sadly keep falling
And I will look up to find
Handfuls of hope
Patches of blue
Where I can
Above
Beautifully written!
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It came together nicely, lots of feelings.
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Thank you for this very moving poem, Kristie.
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There’s a lot of emotion for me in my writing. I never know exactly where a poem will take me, and I’m finding I wind up in a hopeful place even when the subject matter is darker. Hope is good.
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This is so simple and yet so powerful. It communicates the emotions and questions so very effectively. Thank you for sharing this.
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I think the title of your blog says it best . . . Don’t Lose Hope.
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Aw … thank you for that lovely comment.
I chose the title because of something traumatic I was going through at the time. (But I wouldn’t compare it to a cancer diagnosis. What you have experienced is trauma on another level entirely.)
But, truly, we ALL need hope!
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We all have our stuff and trauma is trauma. We do all need hope. I have come back to hope time after time again. It is one of my favorite things. We will hope together. 💕
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I simply love your writing. You have a gift for capturing our feelings.
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Sometimes it’s harder to convey what I feel, especially to people not living with cancer. Poetry is a very effective way for me to express emotion.
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