Poem #10 for Poetry Month-Free Verse

This is, compared to using ancient poetic forms, a free verse, a semi-lyrical narrative poem but I include it here because our son survived an ordeal with a prolonged perforated appendix some years ago. And yesterday culminated a week of great good news for our "boy", who is now a happy and healthy twenty-seven year old with a glowing future.

I got off our lightstation by helicopter, thanks to the compassionate and speedy Coast Guard service for occasions like this, and then flew with a commercial plane and drove another hundred miles up into the Okanagan to see him. After the initial shock and then relief, of sorts as he had a long road to recovery, I was struck by this dignified old cowboy coming in to the hospital. Sometimes when we are in a state of shock, we notice the oddest things.

Here's to our great BC ambulance attendants, an outstanding family doctor in Nakusp, BC and my friends and family who helped me get through this in all kinds of ways so that we can now cheer on our future inventive engineer today. Photo of Seamus leaping on Lennard Island, Christmas 2014.

Vernon Hospital in August

Now here comes a wizened man

in pressed blue jeans a clean checked shirt

dusted cowboy boots no hat

hurrying through the new-fangled glass doors

holding a shiny tin can low below his leather belt

like a pair of pliers or tin snips in his right hand the can

stripped of its wrapper - pork’n’beans, chili con carne,

peaches? filled now with sweet peas

I will add thee, sweet pea, to the very short list

of things in this world that money cannot buy:

true love & home-grown tomatoes

sweet peas & immortality