Heather Hamilton

Jean Dow Makes a Final Discovery

They came to me
in every state
of distress.

Yellow-eyed
from the bilirubin.

Blank-stared
and hollow-cheeked,
barely able to speak.

Limp in the arms
of their loved ones,
already gone.
And we all knew it.

They came to me
and came to me
and I could do nothing.
And I could not come
to a peace with this.

Kala azar.
Even the name
a cup brimming
with evil.

So I looked it
square in the eye
of my microscope.
I looked, as so many looked,
for a treatment.

And with Providence
looking down on me,
I found one.

From then,
I looked
into the eyes
of my patients,
tartar emetic syringe
in hand,
and told them
this might not save them,
that all I could guarantee
was more suffering,
but it was
our best hope.

And in this way
so many were saved.

But I looked fetching
in the body
that had been
assigned to me
like a surgical apron.

And there was
no slipping out of it
at the end of a long
and merciless day.

And upon my death,
When they looked
back on my life,
my beauty and piety
were all they mentioned.

In truth,
my whole world
was prayer.

My prayers
were the cool rags
I folded over
blazing foreheads,
the sweat-damp hair
I stroked
as the purgatives
took hold.

My work was
living intercession.

Such a tiresome illness,
to look and look
and still not see.
And where is
the cure for that? 

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Heather Hamilton is the author of Here Is a Clearing, which was published by the Poetry Society of America, and has received awards from the Academy of American Poets and the T.S. Eliot Foundation. Her poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in Copper Nickel, Bennington Review, Birdcoat Quarterly, Smartish Pace, Poetry Northwest, and the Cincinnati Review among other journals.