Thinking of Amy

(A rough draft scribbled onto a program at the Poetry Festival today)

I checked into the Hilton
the same weekend that she
checked into the children's hospital.

It had been years since
I and my husband had left all our
children over night.  Ten, in fact.
We had two then, now six.

But she has six also.
The common grandparents tend all
twelve.
In the house of another sister
with her own six.

Across miles of  ocean, one soldier
waits for an airplane. 
He gets a ten day break from the war
to be home where a battle of another kind begins.

Three years, they say, it takes
to conquer leukemia of this kind.
But three years is a lifetime

when you blew out
three candles only last December.