Page 30 - WTP Vol. XI #5

Funky Robot (continued from preceding page)
My oldest brother’s widow
sent me a list of things
“You never knew about him”:
such as, while suffering from COPD, he took ballroom dance
lessons with his wife.
My second brother, a doctor, visited my mother after
she quit her life-preserving meds. They’d shared a last waltz,
until her heart monitor
had fallen off, causing nurses
to rush in, expecting the worst.
*“Do we keep dancing because to stop would mean the extinction of
everything we value?...or because
there are still things to celebrate?”
asks the Oedipus scholar, Claire Catenaccio, about the ancient, tragic choruses.
23
Henry’s books include Restless for Wrods: Poems (Finishing Line Press, 2023) and Foundlings: Found Poems From Prose (Gazebo, 2022). Trim Reckonings: Poems and a US edition of Foundlings (with art by Ruth K. Henry) are forthcoming from Pierian Springs Press. He was the founding editor of Ploughshares and is Prof. Emeritus at Emerson College.