Today's poem is by SK Rancy

Ars Medica
       

What use is
a poet

roaming a hospital's
dim hallowed grounds

glare of overhead lights
a pale mimicry

of the sun I never see
a mercy

to blot out
the horror

weeping & wreckage
mangled flesh & limbs

bones
tenting skin, a garish

circus
blood and piss

bespattering the floor
in whose designs

I pretend to see
Pollock or Monet

but never see
God

By whose cosmic
architecture

are the wretched
borne along

crippled & ruptured
to my feet

slave to
some grand design

mandating we weary
cadre of reapers

with knife &
flame

split sternum & rib
& char away

the flesh
& demand you live

our only power
the knowledge

of books —
the dance of cells

under microscope
a beauteous ballet

or the secret magic
of atoms & molecules

floating in plasma
dust motes spinning

in sun
& the teachings

of dead men
shamans & prophets

philosophers & priests
— in me

& these hands
amounting

to nothing
impotent against

the surging sea
of fate

after death
beneath

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Copyright © 2023 SK Rancy All rights reserved
from Self-Portrait In Hospital As Camus
Diode Editions
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission