Walking To Siloam

    by Ed Bennett

Stand and balance; cane in the right hand.

Step forward with the remnants of your left leg,

strike with the heel, roll forward to the toe

(the prosthetic knee locks – a matter of faith)

place your weight on the right side,

now right foot forward to complete the step.

Advance the cane.

Repeat.

I move slowly, odd in my gait

like a marionette, the stereotype

of an old man perambulating

to nowhere in particular,

repeating the mantra silently:

“cane, left, right…cane, left, right”

This is the day of reckoning:

parallel bars abandoned,

my wheelchair locked behind me.

With the havoc of this leg

I am cast from the safety

of my wheeled nest

into the void around me

with no hand holds,

no aids for mobility save for

two recalcitrant feet

slowly dividing space across

this tenuous distance.

“Cane, left, right…”

I was lifted from despondency

by hands placed on the affliction

of broken body and mind bereft,

exhorting me to leave the pallet,

rise because muscle and soul

will it so.

“Cane, left right…”

I walk the grand distance of sixty feet

aware of the analytic stare

at the geometry of a damaged leg

before we stop for the day,

my residual limb aching,

my brow touched with sweat,

searching for words to describe

how the angel’s feather

roils the pool

to form this miracle.

© 2014  Ed Bennett

Ed Bennett is a poet and reviewer living in Las Vegas, NV.  His works have appeared in The Externalist, Touch: The Journal of Healing, The Lavender Review, Quill and Parchment, and Lilipo. He is a staff editor for Quill and Parchment Magazine, the recipient of a Pushcart Nomination and the author of “A Transit of Venus”.