Sister Ann Robb Writes a Letter

Here’s another poem from How the Hand Behaves. The speaker is not me, but one of my sisters, when she was dying of cancer:

Sister Anne Robb Writes a Letter

Having turned in my stamps,

signed on to silence,

I dream

the old friends

open their empty mailboxes.

In dreams,

they come to visit,

dressed oddly,

staring and shy.

In dreams,

they shout out to me

from the other end of the church.

I trace their names

in the sand of my palm

and God

washes them

into Himself