Poem by Carol Frost

I originally posted two
poems.
On second glance
I had to separate them.
It didn't seem fair to either one.

Apiary viii (For the ones

who line the corridors and sit
silent in wheelchairs
before the television with the volume off,
whose cares
are small and gray and infinite,
time as ever to be faced    ...
Methuselahs the nurses wash
and dress without haste —
none needed    ...
this one has drunk from the poppy-cup
and drowses in her world of  dream    ...
Heliotrope,
carnations, wakeful violets, and lilies in vases —
masses of  flowers — wrap
the urine-and-antiseptic air in lace    ...
Please wake up; it is morning;
robins whistle; the bees dance.
Isn't this other one listening
from her shell of  silence,
and shouldn't she smile at the green return
and dappled light through windows?
As earth orbits the corridor
clocks are wound    ...
The last hour is a song or wound    ...
Except in this corridor — mother's —
where finity's brainless wind
blows ash, and ash again
blows through their cells:
So much silence, so little to say in the end.)

Carol Frost, from Poetry (October 2007)