Greg McBride: “Good News”
GOOD NEWS
Bad arm first, lean this way, hold tight the bed rail,
Rose instructs my wife in charmingly fluent English.
In Cameroon, she won a lottery, left her family,
and sailed off to America. Here, she commands
our former family room, now home
to her orderly assemblage of hospital bed,
bedside table on wheels, pills, pillows, gloves,
pads and bowls, towels and straws, books and remotes.
A bit bossy, Rose loves to advise
—where to shop, where to fix a car—and believes
in an eternal power, a gauzy being
determined to save us from ourselves, for a price—
a belief so commonplace back home
that she disbelieves our disbelief:
You mean, they put you in the ground, cover it up,
and that’s it? That’s all there is? No heaven?
Yes, I say, kindly as I can, and feign regret.
I don’t say that we view heaven as one among
the lovely, hubristic myths that babble about
our world with baffling persistence. For us,
Rose, you are the good news, you who traveled far
from home to help my wife, an aged woman
in need, and me, staggered by her need, and my own.
It is you who will save us. It is you.
Greg McBride is the author of Guest of Time (Pond Road Press, 2023), Porthole (Liam Rector First Book Prize for Poetry, Briery Creek Press, 2012), and a chapbook, Back of the Envelope (Southeast Missouri State University Press, 2009). His work appears in Alaska Quarterly, Bellevue, Boulevard, Gettysburg Review, New Ohio Review, Rhino, River Styx, Salmagundi, and Southern Poetry Review.