Ron Domen
Pennsylvania, United States

 

Poet’s statement: The loss of an unborn child through miscarriage, abortion, or premature death is always a highly charged emotional event for the parents. My poem is an attempt to not only capture the emotion of such an event but also to be mindful that life is renewed. The inspiration for “Plaintive Music” came from the loss of an unborn child that affected me and my wife.

Plaintive music On that day in waning winter as the sunrise spread red-orange and purple like a bruise only the brightest star Sirius could still be seen pulsating like the dot of heart on the sonogram of our unborn child wrapped in ariled darkness before it too disappeared in the morning light. Now in the last days of summer newly hatched cicadas brown-red as blood clots rise from grounded dormancy on journeys marked by liturgical drones until their bronzed chitinous skin becomes too tight to hold such plaintive music and splits to leave behind empty hard-shelled wombs.

Photography by Luis Argerich

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RON DOMEN, MD, is professor of pathology, medicine, and humanities at the Penn State College of Medicine/Milton S. Hershey Medical Center. He has taught medical humanities to medical students and is also a member of the The Doctors Kienle Center for Humanistic Medicine at Penn State’s College of Medicine. His poems have appeared in several literary journals and anthologies.

 

Highlighted in Frontispiece Fall 2012 – Volume 4, Issue 4
Fall 2012  |  Sections  |  Poetry