Shadows
My front door stood open,
but I thought I’d left it
closed.
I tip-toed in and called:
“Is anybody there?”
Echo answered
‘… there, there, there …”
then silence.
I walked
from room to room,
startled by shadows.
I opened doors,
looked under the table,
searched behind chairs.
Nothing. No one.
The house stood
still and empty,
save for the fear,
the silent fear,
that lurked
like a remembered cancer
and occupied each room.
First published on this blog, Shadows, 27 April 2017. Here now with some minor changes and a voice recording.
rogermoorepoet 
This is haunting, Roger. I love the hearing the different qualities in your voice as you read a piece like this. You have a gift for it.
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Thank you for sharing it with us!
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No problem. My feeling always is that if I can help just one person face those fears and realize the extent to which others share them. Also, it is so difficult to talk about, during diagnosis (denial), treatment (the soft breeze of shared hope), and the recovery (has it really gone and will it come back). I have seen so many suffer and lost too many good friends. Just to reach out is good. And so important.
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It is important, and you have done a beautiful job with it.
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Thank you, Tanya. There is something about cancer, a memory that clings, a fear that it will return, sneak up, and carry you away again. It is indeed haunting: a chill wind in an empty house.
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I had some of those feelings when my dad passed after a brief battle with lung cancer at 43. I didn’t have them for myself, but I did feel that shadow of fear over others I loved. On a positive note, I learned to live with “death as a reality” at a young age, and that ultimately contained the fear for me.
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When you meet or come close to ‘the angel of death’ and realize that ultimately you can do nothing about it, life takes on a very different meaning. When you embrace him and realize that he is the eventual law, then things become easier.
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Fear is so paralyzing both personally and politically.
Dwight
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A great one!
Dwight
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