This is one of my favourite poems...
Written and performed by this poet named Asia Samson.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F2zI21Q1W1U
(disclaimer: I do not own the right to this poem. This is just a mere interpretation of what the original poet has performed through the video in the link above)
When the snow falls in the winter,
the woolly caterpillar crawls into a crevice and freezes to death.
Its blood stops flowing, its lungs hardens into ice, its heart comes slowly to a halt.
The heart is always the last to go.
But when the snow melts in the spring,
The ice stalls from its ventricles, the crystals dissolves from its lungs,
and just as slowly as it died, the woolly caterpillar awakens and comes back to life.
For 120 hours we waited for my sister to wake up.
My family mumbling prayers around the doctor who tells us
"she fell into a coma when a blood vessel hemorrhaged"
and my father has not stopped praying since.
My stepfather searching the eyes of doctors for the answers to those prayers
My siblings pushing me into the room as though I could perform a miracle
My mother making twin towers of my arms, the way she crashes into them now
while I attempted to believe that my faith far exceeds science and God would've awakened her somehow,
awaken sweet sister.
Tell me that my tears the size of mustard seeds will fall upon your cheek
and move the mountain of swelling in your brain.
Tell me that the same God who makes all things possible can still live up to His name, because
right now, that name belongs to your mother, who's cursing God for being too powered to make up His own mind, as she stares at the medical forms granting the hospital permission to let you die.
"If He wants her, then take her", she says, "who am I to decide?"
and by her side is your fiance, whose fists are stones he's ready to throw if the doctor mentions organ donation just one more time but your father,
he sits still praying at your bedside, wrapping rosaries around your hands, and tucking prayer cards behind your neck, "God will resurrect my daughter", he says. "Please, God. Tell me she'll resurrect."
How do I respond?
How do I agree when the tubes of your IV intertwines around my throat,
strangles my voice every time I plead:
awaken sweet sister.
Make this poem easier to write.
Tonight, pull out the respirator in your throat and speak the words that will end this poem brighter than how it begun. Remove the tubes and we'll blow kisses into your veins that you may know where the true source of your life comes from. How it comes from your heart.
How when this hurricane whirled, it broke it into tiny pieces.
Drop them like care packages on our laps; you always had enough of it to give,
which is why there are 200 people in the waiting room now ready to give it back in case you needed to live
But on the seventh day, the doctor gave us the results of the last test my sister will ever take
and I swear, I'm not built for earthquakes like that. My knees buckling like a bridge, my arms shaking too much to catch another one of my mother's crash landings.
None of us was left standing.
We were all falling through the cracks, falling until we hit the floor of her room that night;
this is what rock bottom must look like.
The nurse disconnecting her machines, our hands stretching to touch a part of her as we wailed,
our tears dropping as fast as her heartbeat, our sanity vanishing with her breath,
faster it faded;
my stepfather stroking her face,
faster it faded;
my father presses her hand to his cheek,
faster it faded;
we're still waiting on a miracle,
faster it faded;
my face planted to my mother's belly
"mommy this hurts",
faster it faded;
and then it was finished.
Her monitors dropped to zero, and as her breath emptied and her heartbeat slowed, her fiance removes the ring from her finger, ties it to his necklace and says, "how fitting".
It was her heart that was the last to go.
It was silent after that.
Silent as my mother reaches over to close her daughter's eyes, my stepfather releases a long-awaited sigh, my siblings straightens the creases in her blanket while my father unravels the rosary from her hands, takes the prayer cards from behind her neck and slips them into his pocket, places a kiss on her forehead, her chest and both her shoulders. "Put in a good word to God for us," he says.
And that's when I knew,
that all along we had failed to see the light at the end of this tunnel she was going through
because while we were praying for her awakening, the awakening was really meant for us,
to remind us that life is coma we can still choose to wake up from;
that faith means not having to wait for the sun to come, because sometimes, the sun doesn't come
but we can still rise on our own.
Her last breath has already blown life into the candles of our bones
with nothing more than a wish that we may live more fully.
The woolly caterpillar
freezes to death in the winter
and comes back to life
in the spring.
For 14 years, it goes through the same cycle of awakening, waiting until the final year when its work is complete, then spins itself into a cocoon to be reborn to moth and fly away for good.
So, sleep now sweet sister. You surrendered your life at too many winters; we'll take it from here.
Sleep now and wherever you wake, may you be reborn with wings on your back, fly into the sun knowing that when our own winter ends, spring will come and we'll see each other again, but until then, yeah
Put in a good word to God for us.
