Photo by Muha Ajjan
April 2, 2020
Gravity’s Pull
It gets harder, day after day
to push yourself up, out of the ground.
But you do. You get up and about. Your work
can’t be done from home
The air outside my home is thickened with nerves
Quietness is as heavy as gravity
Asphalt wears a long black face of mourning
consoled intermittently by
a car or two or
two silhouettes, walking……….six feet apart.
The scene is -like in horror movies-
soaked in slowness:
Molecules drag and stretch each other
extending a lingering fear that seems never to end
I push the gate to my office building open
with my elbow. It is getting harder to press forward
with hands.
The doors of the exam rooms in my clinic stand tall like scarecrows
their knobs stare at me with malicious contempt
Do I disinfect before? Or after I turn them? Or Both?
I ask my patients to take a deep breath in, then exhale to listen to their lungs
I hold mine.
When we were kids, I competed with my brother on how long we each could hold our breaths.
I always won, until he was forced by a train crossing a car to hold his, forever.
Holding my breath longer is the only thing that is getting easier
We are all in this together, true,
but cancer patients negotiate with two forms of death:
One peeks on them from their insides
and one hovers over their heads, like a cloud
They wear fear like a double-faced coat,
plausible both ways.
It is a one-sided negotiation. How
do you convince a virus not to devour lungs? How
do you talk cancer into slowing down?
There is no argument to pull. No point to advance.
There is only a heaviness lodging itself in the spaces where hopes used to live, pushing down, down, and counting as the numbers of death go up and up and up.
The Author
Rana Bitar is a Syrian-American physician, poet, and writer. She earned her Master’s in English and Creative Writing from Southern New Hampshire University. Her poetry has appeared in many journals including, DoveTales, Pittsburgh Poetry Review, Magnolia Review, El Portal, Pacific REVIEW, Black Coffee Review, The Phoenix, The Dewtrope, The International Human Rights Art Festival, The Charleston Anvil, and in Seeing Things: Anthology of Poetry: Woodland Arts Editions and Bright Hill Press & Literary Center, 2020. Her essays have been published in The Pharos Journal and Pink Panther Magazine; her poetry chapbook, A Loaf Of Bread (Unsolicited Press, 2019), was a finalist in the “Concrete Wolf Chapbook Competition” in 2017, and won an honorable mention in “The 2017 Louis Award” for poetry. Her narrative nonfiction book, The Long Tale Of Tears and Smiles, will be published by Global Collective Publishers, Spring 2021. She lives in upstate NY, where she practices hematology and oncology.
Rana Bitar