On Receiving Results of a Biopsy

“Cancer,” she said before hanging up.
And just like that my world was shattered.

A single word,
the one they told me I probably wouldn’t hear.

“If it was cancer,” the previous doctors had said,
“it would be bigger by now and you’d be in more pain.”

But they were wrong. They were all wrong.
The woman on the phone said it was aggressive.
I don’t like the sound of that.

For a long time I sat with the phone in my lap,
stunned, mumbling the word over and over,
each time the word becoming more real,
my future less certain, as if I was standing before a cavern.

For the first time in my life, I understood
the way Noah must surely have stopped his labor
from time to time, wiped his sweaty brow,
and gazed fretfully at the dark, roiling clouds.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

About the author: In the fall of 2022, Dr. John Smelcer was diagnosed with stage 2 B-cell, non-specified, non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma, a metastatic cancer of the lymphatic system. He is currently undergoing hospitalization cycles of chemo and immuno-therapy. John Smelcer is the author of 60 books, including a dozen books of poetry. His most recent collection is Raven. For a quarter century, he was Poetry Editor at Rosebud Magazine, where he currently serves as Senior Editor Emeritus. From 2016-2020, he was the Inaugural Writer-in-Residence for the Charter for Compassion, the world’s largest compassion movement with over five million members in 45 countries.