Litera

Released

Chris M. Mann

Received: 12 Aug. 2018; Accepted: 10 Oct. 2018; Published: 23 Jan. 2019

Copyright: © 2019. The Author(s). Licensee: AOSIS.
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

a poem to Christ after an asthma attack

You came to me just after I’d run up from an underground carpark into a mall.
My lungs clenched tight, my body numbed as crowds of shoppers ambled by.
It must have been the tensions at the office, the hellish fumes of car exhausts,
Dust blowing from a heating plant. My eyesight dimmed, my mouth went dry.

Shop-front smudges of light, fairground-mirror people, shopping-bags, prams,
Tinsel music tinkling, far away. I was suffocating, speechless, desperate, alone.
Time’s framework burst. Scraps of memory, thought-flits whirled out and then
The ragged shroud-print of a face with steady-gazing eyes I knew to be your own.

You looked at me, the image blurred, the flux rushed back – and you had gone,
Gone back into the neural mansions in my mind-brain, where I’ll never know.
I felt consoled, not much, stuck in that empty cinema with a flickering screen,
And wished your gravitas would shape back into my space-time debris’ show.

Eye-lids drooping, I slumped onto a bench and put my head between my knees.
Slurring spasms, I fought with panic, breathed in small gasps, struggled to pray.
Earth’s air-sphere fed my blood again. Panting, wheezing, I felt a peace return.
The joy I felt when you got through to me came later on, just how I couldn’t say.