Larynx

My roommate read me this poem out of her textbook for a course she's taking called Medical Visions in Literature. We're some of those strange people who read each other poetry for fun. This one is honest and humorous while looking at the heavy and mysterious topic of death.

Larynx

Now this is it, said Death,

and as far as I could see

Death was looking at me, at me.

This all happened in hospital,

in washed out corridors,

and the doctor peered at me

with periscopic eyes.

He stuck his head in my mouth,

scratched away at my larynx --

perhaps a small seed

of death was stuck there.

At first, I turned into smoke

so that the cindery one

would pass and not recognize me.

I played the fool, I grew thin,

pretended to be simple or transparent --

I wanted to be a cyclist

to pedal out of death’s range.

Then rage came over me

and I said, “Death, you bastard,

Haven’t you enough with all those bones?

I’ll tell you exactly what I think:

you have no discrimination, you’re deaf

and stupid beyond belief.

“Why are you following me?

What do you want with my skeleton?

Why don’t you take the miserable one,

the bitter, the unfaithful, the ruthless,

the murderer, the adulterers,

the two-faced judge,

the deceiving journalist,

tyrants from islands,

those who set fire to mountains,

the chiefs of police,

jailers and burglars?

Why do you have to take me?

What business have I with Heaven?

Hell doesn’t suit me --

I feel fine on the earth.”

With such internal mutterings

I kept myself going

while the restless doctor

went tramping through my lungs,

from bronchea to bronchea

like a bird from branch to branch.

I couldn’t feel my throat;

my mouth was open like the jaws of a suit of armor,

and the doctor ran up and down

my larynx on his bicycle,

till, serious and certain,

he looked at me through his telescope

and pried me loose from death.

It wasn’t what they thought.

It wasn’t my turn.

If I tell you I suffered a lot,

and really loved the mystery,

that Our Lord and Our Lady

were waiting for me in their oasis,

if I talk of enchantment,

and being eaten up by distress

at not being close to dying,

if I say like a stupid chicken

that I die by not dying,

give me a boot in the butt,

fit punishment for a liar.

-Pablo Neruda

(translated by Alastair Reid)

Photo source