Prisms

They wake with questions— 

some fun, silly, sweet: Do slugs have blood? 

Is water wet? Questions of wonder: Can humans fly? Do we breathe in heaven? 

And the sweetest, most tender, as they hold their stuffy frog 

named Fernando: He isn’t really alive, is he? 

They want him to have a heart beating like theirs. 

They want others to appreciate the small things 

as they do, tiny medicine cups and elevator buttons 

and shiny beads and spiny patterns on leaves in sunlight. 

Their curiosity spans through the turn of each hour 

into the next, through long days in the clinic, evenings spent 

playing card games and chatting about gravity and the earth, 

the stars and constellations, how they held their spinal fluid 

in an MRI and saw the vessels of their heart in motion. 

We laugh and they paint a pair of birds, fashion a swirling rainbow 

out of ribbons around us, do a jig down the hallway, ask again: 

Do I mind staying with them? Is it ok that I help them 

in the bath? I move the washcloth gently over their back 

as they ponder: What makes soap slippery? Can we travel backwards 

in time? I wish for the Delorean, for it to be 1985, to be 

seven years old again. The warm water falls over our skin 

and we fall silent as suds bloom. They ask: Am I asking 

too many questions? I shake my head No, No— 

tell them the truth, that they were always an inquisitive child, now 

an extraordinary teenager, and that questions mean 

they find marvels, that they are a keeper of wonder and life. 

In their eyes I see the echoing glisten of my own tears, my own 

terrible fears and magnificent hope. They ask: Am I ticklish? 

I smile and reach forward and we tumble 

into laughter again, prisms of sparkling light 

through cancer’s storm. 

Stacie Eirich is a mother of two and author. Her book, Hope Like Sunlight (Bell Asteri Publishing, 2024), is an illustrated memoir in poetry, prose and art of her family’s journey to a cure for their child from brain cancer. All proceeds from the book benefit St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital & Ronald McDonald House. Her poems have recently been published in The Amazine, The Bluebird Word and Synkroniciti Magazine. She lives in Texas with her family. www.stacieeirich.com