She fell asleep as she often did thinking
of that first operation, the longest,
her team fourteen hours in the theatre,
a white child’s brain given to a black –
the furies raging. She woke at dawn wheezing,
coughing, chest tightening, inhaler out of reach,
knowing the attack for what it was,
hearing, somewhere distant, children’s voices.
In death her right hand was open as if
holding an orb, her left clutching her heart.
She had dreamt of the abandoned islands
of the lagoon; the broken bell towers,
the wild fig trees; the discovery,
with her girlhood’s lost companions, of an arm,
female, severed from a marble statue,
the supple hand holding an apple.
The famous surgeon died in the Royal Suite
that Easter Sunday when Armageddon came
at last to the Levant. She could hear
children egg-hunting on the greensward
five floors below – between waves breaking
in an attenuated roar, vestiges
of a storm out in the Cretan Sea.
Beyond the horizon to the east, countless
villages and cities went to smoke
then dust; deserts became relentless;
theologies cracked like bowls of eggs.
By David Selzer