Editor's Note: We are all strangers in a strange land, but certain circumstances tend to heighten our awareness of that condition. Brett Foster, associate professor of English at Wheaton College, is a poet and translator of poetry, a Renaissance scholar, a lover of Shakespeare and of theater more generally, husband to Anise, father of Avery and Gus, a member of All Souls Anglican Church. In June 2014, out of the blue, he was diagnosed with Stage IV colon cancer. The first poem below, "Prayer Before Reading St Mark's Gospel," was written in July 2014; the other three are from this summer.
Prayer Before Reading St Mark's Gospel
Please attack my colonialist ego, o lion-face, o ancient evangelist. The carcinogenic self, gleeful but cruel in its unhealthy glow, needs every means of resistance, nor do I expect your treatment to be remotely easygoing, if any freedom is to be won from tumor, polyp, cyst. Don't let my withheld forgiveness be among the glittering cargo of my sickly little boat, battered, kissed by fortune's surges. Let me bestow instead regard to every fellow narcissist, to thief and punk, humbug and arsonist.
Poem with a Phrase from George Herbert
Even if the body's garment has been rent, it can still become an establishment for rebuilding spirit, new, tender, and quick. If there is no market for one's sickness, there is at very least an etiquette for feeling better—felt pain and everything met in extremity, that is. There exists the tumor, cyst, or grisly polyp, and Christ resides, persists amid these hundred hells, his garment hemmed with pomegranates, golden bells.
A Thank-You Note, to Be Accompanied with Lyre
I have spent only three days here so far, and have been gut-sick the entire time, but I've managed to write three poems I think I can live with, poems about living and the other option. I hope I can live with them. Besieged by adversities, I give Praise to Somebody for sweet verse's irresistible remedies, and so much more. What more can an invalid ask for? A fourth poem, you ask? Well, here it is. At least let's praise art's ancient deities. While Euripides staged tragedies in Athens, raging reminders of our sad entanglements, these Pan-foot gods were making merry, cavorting in their floral dances, alive forever, plagueless in the wide fields of Arcady.
Incantation
pistle and plunger year like a dungeon
salt air and sea swell all shall be well
reaching the edge gives no more privilege
it so feels like a telos
glimmer of sun running in haggard
shows no regard for so many hazards
these are the ill rhymes of an untimely pilgrim
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