Face down
I fell in the desert
The grainy earth embedded
In the palms of my hands
Where I lay.
Overhead the blazing
Desert sun, beneath hard
Sand, underlaid with shale.
I had to run to catch
The bus for Paradise,
You on it, but the odd vehicle
Took off without me,
Lying there in the heat,
Sky bright blue, scrapes
Bloody and burning. A pain
In my knee, perhaps a wound
I should have always.
Soul ever afterwards
Bereft of you,
Except for that image,
You bent over your drawing,
Studying the calligraphy
Of entombment,
As the bus pulled away.
Bettie Anne Doebler is retired from many years of teaching English. She now devotes herself to writing poetry. Thirty of her poems have been published in a book, Book of the Mermaid, and in 1994 she published a book of literary criticism, "Rooted Sorrow:" Dying in Early Modern England. She has suffered from strains of depression, both in her family of birth and her own close family, particularly with the suicides of her daughter and her husband.