Mothering AIDS: Snippets from my encounters and conversations with mothers who stood by the suffering of their sons in the complexities of AIDS in the first twenty years of my priesthood. I wrote this poem recently as the first in a series.
At the screen door
We meet at the dirty screen door
Her face in shadow
Her fragile hand reaches for the loose doorknob from the inside
She seems taller because I stand a step down on the front porch
Sweat dripping down my back from the summer sun and
Nerves because another mother
Invites me over the threshold to sit aside a son’s deathbed
Still desiring the best for him
The priest’s last call
The pills exhausted and the chemo done
The oil is on the thumb of the man who
Opens the door to heaven within her heart at least
From her whispering invitation I slowly
Creep the narrow bedroom path amid silent machines
Strangers in this quiet room creating more fear than remedy
I open up my prayers and my heart in the darkened space
His empty eyes look through me
I sing a lullaby of faith
My heart resting in his
Connecting his silence and his song of unspoken truth
Feeling the eternal shore wash up against his bed
I touch him
Laying my hand on his forehead bearing open sores
With oil and prayer deeper than the silence
Blessing him in his fear that I will condemn him
More distracting than the pain beating against his breath
His worry that no holy man would touch his truth
The real man
His mother and I give him away and birth him again
We amble back to the threshold
She tells me I am the only person to touch her dying son
She rests those grateful words and her face on my chest
Then pushes open the worn out screen door
Toward the warm light
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A beautiful, moving meditation. Thank you.
What a beautiful, touching poem. It brings back memories of my involvement with AIDs community health programs in the mid to late 80s in Riverside County, California, and in the 90s the death from AIDS of a favorite pastor. Thank you for sharing.
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So beautifully written . So real .
Thank you for sharing this beautiful reflection.
Ron, thank you for writing and sharing this beautiful poem. I love it that many people are responding to your poetry; this is as is should be since it is infused with the love of Jesus.