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Tumor
August 1, 2004

Dad came home from the hospital,
Mom still tucked in tight.
My baby sister three days old,
Dressed in pink and white.
We visit them every day,
Mom, and the baby.
The doctors look hopeful,
As they mumble, 'maybe'.

She doesn't know what she means to us,
A tiny child in tiny clothes,
Yet so large in your hearts.
How can she look so healthy,
And be dying on the charts?
Mom won't hear the bad,
It breaks her heart to pieces.
I wonder what we could have had,
If not for these diseases.

The doctors use such big machines,
To scan her little head.
She's being swamped in all this pain,
In all the terror and dread.
No day passes when Dad isn't there,
Standing over my baby sister,
Draped in tubes, medicine for her care.
And he cries, my dad, because he's scared.

They hadn't decided on her name,
She's just 'the sick baby in room A'.
Nurses and white coats go in and out,
To my sister, then my mother,
To tell her all about,
The tests, the scans, and what they've found.
It's too big for a baby,
It's large, dark, and round.

Time gets slower,
When you spend every day this way.
Hoping for good news,
Preparing for bad.
I want to tell Mom,
Please don't be sad.
But how can I tell her,
Everything will be okay?
When maybe my sister,
Won't live to see another day?

We're sitting, the three of us,
Waiting in silence, for who knows what to say?
I look at my dad, and mom falling asleep.
The hospital blanket tucked tight as to keep,
The only warmth in her body,
From falling away to the same place,
Both of their eyes have gone.
I remember the shadow that hid under her eyes,
My mom who survived it, but almost died.

And now my baby sister, so innocent and young,
Who has done nothing to this world,
To deserve what's going on,
Is being watched and medicated,
Because the shadow in my mom,
Has duplicated.
To the baby we love,
The sister I always wanted.
Who lies in her bed haunted,
With the consumer.
Her dark and spreading death,
That spreading tumor.

This poem is Copyright © Calista