What We Came All This Way For, by John Schneider

“Daylight is not what we came all this way for”
                                     — Philip Levine

We arrived, sheathed in the hospital’s gray shadow
and the unexpected darkness beneath tall green palms,

a pair of common mynah birds harmonizing their elegy
with our uncertain steps and with her distant IV trickle.

Before the plane even touched down the morning had
already entangled. The tattered palm fronds have lost

their crispness and chatter in the ocean breeze.
Though we’re told she’s still trying.  And we are still trying

to make enough room in our arms for such absence.
It is all we can do, forever on the outside looking in.

Each window above us its own dying planet, its own face
trembling back. The labored breath of another falling

sun clouding the glass between us. As we’re only allowed
to enter two at a time, masked and plastic suited, like surgeons

or astronauts, the rest of the family waits impatiently in this
darkening harmony of bird and brick for their turn to grieve

what has not yet left its body, to reassure her all this living will
carry on in us: palm frond and mynah, ocean and ocean and all

this unending song.

John Schneider’s collection, Swallowing the Light, was winner of the 2022 Pinnacle Book Achievement Award in Poetry, a finalist for the International Book Award and nominated for the Hoffer Award.  His non-fiction, Dreaming and Being Dreamt, was published by Routledge in 2023. His poetry is a finalist in Atlanta Review’s 2023 International Poetry Competition. A two-time Pushcart Prize nominee, he resides in Berkeley, California.

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