For today’s submission, I’m  including one more submission generously passed on to us by Donna Trussell.  For this poem, she takes the point of view of the oncologist. I love the empathy she brings to this perspective.

Enjoy

Sam

The Oncologist and Her Ghosts
by Donna Trussell

Her nightmares are blizzards.
Wind swallows words,
and faces freeze
beneath ice and snow.

She wakes with a start.
She rises, lies down, comforts
herself with memories
of another time

before cities, before textbooks
before patients who smiled
and joked and died.
No matter what she did, they died.

She recalls a night
on her father’s farm.
Southern gusts swayed
the moon-tipped trees

and above her were the only
gods she knew. She made a pact:
The stars would protect her
and she would save lives.

She was just a child then,
and even in Nebraska
summer seemed endless
and full of promise.

First published in Chance of a Ghost