Sunday Sonnet: Special Edition

Susan Palwick, over at Rickety Contrivances of Doing Good, writes the best blog I have ever read through tears. She makes me both want to write and stop writing.

Bed 5.1

Room five’s for criticals, and has four beds.
The only room that’s scarier is 2,
though many patients here go home instead
of being brought upstairs, to ICU.
This corner’s where I first saw someone dead.
We’d prayed; her voice had vanished, but I knew
from her expression what she would have said
could she have spoken: “Help me. Help me! Do
you understand?” A dying cat once stared
at me like that. I held her hands and prayed;
she struggled less. But later when I went
to check on her, the patient wasn’t there:
a cold corpse lay, eyes open and afraid,
fixed face a mute mask of abandonment.