Elegy for Kurt

          Psychiatric Ward, Bed 23 Window      

 

When pleaded with to finish
your dinner tray, you say:

I am contemplating the virtues
of the mind vs. the sins of the flesh.

You believed, to feed yourself
fed all Evil in the world.

As war news blossomed on TV,
you became thinner, then cadaverous.

A doctor’s son, you had been stuffed
full of promise, Catholic school and Latin verbs.

Lamb of God—you take away
the sins of the world, have mercy.

Soon your crisp, plaid shirts and khaki
pants hung and billowed, sails on the mast,

and your speech came like purple loosestrife
along the expressway, unexpected bursts of color

shuddering from the sheer force
of what passes by.

---

Susannah W. Simpson’s work has been published in The Homestead Review, North American Review, Potomac, The Wisconsin Review, South Carolina Review, POET, Nimrod International, Poet Lore, Salamander, Sequestrum, SWWIM, Xavier Review among others. Her poem “Lily” was anthologized in Full Moon and Foxglove by Three Drops Press, UK, and her book Geography of Love & Exile was published by Cervena Barva Press (2016). Susannah holds an MFA from Bennington and a PhD from SUNY/Binghamton. She is the founder and co-director of the Performance Poets of the Palm Beaches Reading Series and an Associate Editor for the South Florida Poetry Journal.