Thursday, December 16, 2010

My Poem for Janet

Below is a poem I wrote for my next-door neighbor Janet prior to our surgeries. I hoped that in some small measure this shows my deep gratitude.

For those of you who are good Catholics or perhaps religious studies majors, let me make it very clear that I know the difference between the Feast of the Immaculate Conception (Dec. 8, the day on which I had transplant surgery) and the Annunciation of the Blessed Virgin Mary (March 25). The former entails the conception of Mary without sin, i.e. her parents actually had sex but it was really clean sex and so she was born without sin and remained without sin so that she could be a pure vessel for the baby Jesus. In contrast, the annunciation is when the angel visited Mary and she became "with child" without having sex. But I have taken poetic liberty to intertwine these two in my poem.

     Conception and Rebirth

              (for Janet)

My mother gave birth to me,
but on this Feast of the Immaculate Conception,
you have given me a second life.
Without you, I would be chained
 to a dialysis machine every night until I die,
 becoming ever weaker, hardly able to cross the room.


Like Mary, who was touched by an angel                                                                                
and felt the stirrings of baby Jesus within her loins,                                                                              
I too sense the beginnings of a new life within me,                                                                              
awakened through the gift of your kidney,
one link in an eight-person cross-country chain.
This newness in me and in three other patients
Immaculately conceived through the kidneys of four strangers.

Now freed of tubing, tape, and gauze,
without holes in our arms and our bellies,
we will once more hike, swim, lounge in Jacuzzis,
canoe, camp, surf, take baths,
drink as much water as we like,
travel the world with ease,
and get a good night’s sleep.

As a Buddhist, you might see this transformation in a different light,
as a part of you reborn in another.
Because a man outside Philadelphia gave his kidney to a man in L.A.,
I received his wife’s kidney
and you gave one of yours to someone in Virginia,
whose friend completed the chain,
giving to a patient with a rare blood type in San Francisco.

Four rebirths without four deaths.
A miracle in any religion,
in any way of conceiving the world.
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About Me

Southern California, United States
Perhaps my friend Mark summed me up best when he called me "a mystical grammarian." I am quite a mix--otherworldly, ethereal and in touch with "the beyond," yet prone to being very precise and logical, when need be. Romantic in the big-canvas meaning of the word, I see the world as an adventure, as a love poem, as a realm of beauty and wonder.

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