A Little Too Yellow - Poem

Journal of Family Practice, March, 2001 by Ronald E. Pust

   A little too yellow I fear inside
   those ash gray walls, humid hospital
   fragrance of tropical urine down the hall
   four mornings after you were born,
   foreign born, last born son.
   A little too yellow, all of you
   face to feet, yellow
   and mute
   I lift you high at noon, seven-plus pounds
   by the blue-sky window
   convince us all, your alien clan,
   that you will be cured
   your yellow as evanescent
   as the daffodils I gave your mother
   Aprils ago in Aberdeen.

   Wilting at dusk, the pale yellow
   gold red purple sun flickers gray
   then dark,
   a final surcease from your sepsis.

   In these torpid tropics time
   oozes by inches, surreal
   as a melting clock whose fermenting hands
   hasten us from chapel to hillside to
   bury you.

   The day after, we try to drive the dawn
   before us, two hundred miles west
   back over Daulo Pass where
   we had picked mountain blossoms
   purple and white and yellow a week before
   to bring for your birth
   in the Goroka-green valley below.

   But NOT NOW/NO FLOWERS
   THIS TIME/NO TIME
   NO FLOWERS/PLEASE/HURRY BACK
   HELP/HOSPITAL FULL/NEEDS US/WORK
   NEEDS ME/NEEDS YOU

   Beyond the Pass driving waves of rain cold
   torrents of mountains all day into
   night now
   we see
   a light lone and incandescent
   against the deepening dark
   from the children's ward it shines
   stark
   and too yellow to bear.

All correspondence should be addressed to Ronald E. Pust, MD. E-mail: rpust@u.arizona.edu.