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Rites of passage

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  31 October 2024

David Haosen XiangOpen the ORCID record for David Haosen Xiang[Opens in a new window]
David Haosen Xiang*
Affiliation:
Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA
*
Email: dxiang@hms.harvard.edu
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Information

Type
Poetry
Information
Palliative & Supportive Care , Volume 22 , Issue 6 , December 2024, pp. 2243
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Copyright
© The Author(s), 2024. Published by Cambridge University Press.
The darkness is cold and a light is rising
unhappy. Soon you come into focus
only to fall again. This is nothing to pity.
Over time you learn loneliness
can be a friend. One that shelters love notes
the way streetlamps warm a park bench in winter.
Here, at the end of each journey you let go.
Let the facts of incompletion fill your shoes.
In between the sun rises, hanging there like the past.
A silence, immovable, that burns upwards.
In the afterhours you like to imagine this is a place
where a door could be. That you would step up
and knock assuredly on the ashen wood.
Somebody would answer and there in front of you
a way inside opens. This door would be nice,
you imagine. To leave without
any trace of departure. Start a whole new voyage.
And welcomed in doing so. As you get up
you cry out in fear. Your legs are too heavy.
You see her walking away, out the door which locks.
There is nowhere to go. Look down,
and your hands have leapt from childhood to old age.
But home is the place you keep thinking of.
When the night is still and the lights are too. As if
every breath meets stoic resistance.
Across the street a light fizzles out,
a woman in overalls is replacing the bulb.
You take off your shoes and begin again.