On Entering the Oncology Building

by Kelley J. White

Kannon, with endless giving night and day,
Has worn a thousand wooden hands away.
—Ho-o

There was a woman wrapped in her weeping,
blue eyes in a brown face melting. I would
hold her with my presence, a gesture of
hands, an embrace across air, my heart’s dumb
reaching.

I knew it had happened: I would
see pain beneath a thousand tight grins;
see all, reach to hold all, reach to take all
until I, filled, would rise and be a blossom
of tears.

The child
at the elevator knew me, the gathered family,
the woman wet with heartbreak, the others holding
numb. The child greeted me with joy and I saw
this once just what to say, knew

how to give
the lift that would float them to the bedside,
float them through a mother’s dying, float them
with my heavy love to a place of sweet witness
and recognized
grace.