Each day another minute of daylight
swallowed. I count the days forward
to lengthening light. I count backward
through the shortening too.
Yesterday my dead mother turned 90.
My father hadn’t noticed.
For days prior, death inhabited his live skeleton—
each labored breath rattled his stiffening lungs.
Newly arrived three weeks before,
my father sat propped up in his hospice bed
as plump as a squirrel in late autumn.
A menu in one hand, he eyed the meal before him.
Then ghosts began to visit his dreams—
some horrible scenes that frightened him.
In one, he replaced Placido Domingo on stage.
In another, a famous chemistry professor went postal.
The waning December light shines
in through the blinds. Each day
my father eats less and less. Each day
another minute of daylight, swallowed.
Filmmaker and photographer Carla Schwartz’s poems have appeared in The Practicing Poet (Diane Lockward, Ed) and in her collections “Signs of Marriage,”(Finishing Line) “Mother, One More Thing,” (Turning Point) and “Intimacy with the Wind,” (Finishing Line). Learn more at (https://twitter.com/cb99videos), YouTube (https://youtube.com/cb99videos), Threads (https://threads.net/@cb99videos), BlueSky:( https://bsky.app/profile/cb99videos.bsky.social) or Instagram (https://instagram.com/cb99videos). Recent and future curations include Banyan Review, The Ear, Channel, Cutthroat, great weather for MEDIA, Inquisitive Eater, MacQueen’s Quinterly, Modern Haiku, New-Verse News, One Art Haiku Anthology, Paterson Literary Review, Poetry SuperHighway, Remington Review, Savor, an anthology of food poems, Schuylkill Valley Journal, Sheila-Na-Gig, Silver Birch Press, Smoky Quartz, Stone Poetry Quarterly, Triggerfish, The MacGuffin, Pulsebeat, Verse-Virtual, Worcester Review, and Leon. Carla Schwartz is a 2023 recipient of a Massachusetts Cultural Council Grant. Her poem, “Pat Schroeder Was Our Mother,” won the 2023 New England Poetry Club E.E. Cummings Prize.