Loosening the Bonds – Unhook the IV Drips and Let Me Be Full as the March Moon – a poem by Katherine Leonard

Loosening the Bonds – Unhook the IV Drips and Let Me Be Full as the March Moon


i.
Full moon rose the night I died.
Last full moon of winter.
I rose with the Full Sap Moon 
	to lean down and feel its rising in maples.
I felt earthworms waken as the Worm Moon's beams 
	penetrated their underground sleep.
My friends the Nuns knew me in the Paschal Full Moon
	as I passed by.

ii.
Could such pain have been believed?
Sudden and crippling halt 
	of my labyrinth walk.
My voice doubled inward, and prayer 
	was a mandala
	 	of pleas for relief.

A simple tune-up at the hospital 
	became stronger music. 
Crescendo of pain so gripping, 
my blood pressure
failed. Tethered to fluids that floated me.

Cacophony of voices. So many people. Symphonic dissonance –
	so many trips rolling narrowly, rapidly through
	bright then dim lights clicks whistles and bells and buzzers.

And so the dawn. 
	So the dawn. 

Not to home. Voices whirled  
	Too dangerous. 	Too much travel	 too delicate. 
Too hard to manage. 	Too short a time. 
Too much internal wrapping, 		
		squeezing, 	smothering. 
Too much.

Surfing through words, beloved hand held mine always. 
Hers, single voice 
		of home, of heart.

Yes, time. 	Now, 
	time to unhook. 
Yes, Honey, yes. 
She answers my only question. 
Yes, this is it.




iii.
March is the season I walked woodland ponds at dusk 
	to hear calls of peepers in their puddles of spring rain. 
But this season of Hyla crucifer, my tiny totem, 
	is the end of my earthwalk. 
Finale of the tiny sprites' Magnificat is forest solitude.

iv.
Time is a process of being, of habit. Of making plans.
	And letting go is a process of becoming. 

The afternoon of my passing, the maple grove's tips 
	made a haze of red against the limitless blue.

I brushed my hand on each bowed head, 
	resting lightly on the white – like a cloud.

Catch the moon at Full.

Katherine Leonard grew up in the US and Italy. She lived in Massachusetts at the time of John F Kennedy’s assassination and experienced segregation and Martin Luther King, Jr.’s assassination as a high school student in rural Texas. She has been a chemist, a geologist and an oncology nurse/nurse practitioner.