Artwork © Ira Joel Haber
Heartsick
She was——heartsick, she said
that her son was healthy
—the irony well understood.
She’d been hoping against hope
and the hero who wanted at Vietnam.
There’d been rumors
of peace—possible—report
of secret Paris talks
and my brother, the would-be-soldier
worried he’d miss his war.
He’d gone to enlist.
‘I only let him go
because I assumed
he’d never pass the physical.
Childhood rheumatic fever
had him taking penicillin
every day for a decade.
I was sure they would send Johno home
and that would be the end of it.
When he told me they’d taken him
I was, I tell you —I was heartsick.’
I never saw what my brother John
wrote home from Vietnam.
Years later I’d find the letters he received
while there: Mom’s breezy news with lapses into
baby-talk, pointless urgings
that he stay safe and enjoy the licorice sent;
my brother Dan’s dry comical accounts
of the home front, baseball standings,
his adolescent take on world affairs;
and the one awkward epistle from my father
asking that Johno write home more often
but with maybe a little less gory detail.
‘For your mother’s sake, kiddo, dial it back a notch.’
‘I was, I tell you —I was heartsick.’
I heard her saying it again in my head
as I watched her,
held her hand, uselessly
I hoped —for her sake,
hoped she was absent somehow from her pain.
and from me —me not knowing what to wish for.
That mask strapped on her face,
her body in that machine
forcing her breath.
Each wild gasp of it a violence.
The doctor told me her heart was enlarged.
It was enormous, he said,
didn’t exactly stop to acknowledge
the exhausted metaphor
though the talk then was about courage, spirit.
Johno did not witness things that night
but I believe he trusted me —the decision
weeks later —the next rushed to hospital visit
when it was agreed not to torture her again.
Tom Driscoll lives and works in Lowell, MA with his wife, artist Denise Driscoll. His last collection of poems was called The Champion of Doubt (Finishing Line Press 2023). Th enext one is tentatively titled An Art To Ignorance.
Ira Joel Haber was born and lives in Brooklyn. He is a sculptor, painter, writer, book dealer, photographer and teacher. His work has been seen in numerous group shows both in the USA and Europe and he has had nine one man shows including several retrospectives of his sculpture. His work is in the collections of The Whitney Museum Of American Art, New York University, The Guggenheim Museum, The Hirshhorn Museum,The Albright-Knox Art Gallery & The Allen Memorial Art Museum. Since 2006 His paintings, drawings, photographs and collages have been published in over 300 online and print magazines. He has received three National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, two Creative Artists Public Service Grant (CAPS) two Pollock-Krasner grants, two Adolph Gottlieb Foundation grants and, in 2010, he received a grant from Artists’ Fellowship Inc. in 2017 & 2018 he received the Brooklyn Arts Council SU-CASA artist-in-residence grant.