Your Parting Gift
I’ve decided to live on the moon
Leaving this blood-flooded, sweat-soaked earth.
I know you cannot come
(You cried and cried and I feel sorry for you).
You asked what you can give me before
The endless time begins
Between us.
Cut your mind, wrap it in red
And I shall inhale it.
Your mind is my darling, spilled with memories.
I could live without you, but couldn’t
Breathe without what I’ll inhale.
One Moment of Love
“Who will say one moment of love isn’t worth all the suffering…”
— Erich Fromm (American psychoanalyst)
She was 68 years and 7 months,
too young to yield to the crab-like cells that gnawed
into her virgin bones and liver, a life suspended
in the twilight zone of morphine.
In her 9th grade the girls taunted her moonlike face.
On her 18th birthday she wore a pair of earrings
and a Senior, tall and dapper, said they looked cute.
Her daddy gave those earrings two days before his heart
went into a flat blue line.
The night she was sent home with dangling morphine
she saw the guy from her Senior year
in her sleep. He said:
I love you, I love you, the only time any man ever said that.
But he was gone as she woke up.
MB Yunus has been an academic physician with innumerable scientific publications. He was always passionate about poetry. He just retired from medicine in order to pursue a new career in writing poetry as well as fiction. He lives alone in Peoria, Illinois. He believes that aloneness is conducive to creativity.
Portage Magazine 