Wayne Michael DeHart  (February, 1997) 

His heart expired at sunset with no one at his side.
The hospital bed was slowly stripped of its linen by
the amiable nurse’s aide ¹ who had blessed him with
winks and nods and smiles, each capturing his gaze.

Nary a flower nor a card had adorned his muted room.
The young girl wondered how this endearing gent
could be forsaken by those whose paths he crossed,
left in silence to struggle alone through his final days.

The doctors had prepared him for the coming of his Night.
The hard news did not surprise him, and he shrugged it off
with a simple nod, amid drifting thoughts about working his
life away, only to to be  prematurely, permanently “retired.”

Days passed. He watched the door through hopeful eyes.
Maybe an old friend, or a neighbor, or someone from work,
would stop by, talk baseball and music, and wish him well,
and remind him that he had been respected and admired.

As time ticked down, no one came to sit down by his bed.
His had been a mostly solitary life of unattended needs;
he filled endless hours of solitude and sadness with idle
speculation and sleepless dreams under unshared covers.

He once loved a Jersey woman who promised him forever.
Then she left quietly in the night of their eighty-third day,
and he soon realized he would never again find such warmth
in the barren eyes and hollow touch of fleeting, casual lovers.

In his fifty-first year, a vicious cancer ravaged his insides.
His restless mind became cluttered in his twilight hours
with the what-ifs and should-haves, the inevitable regrets
of a beaten-down guy who knows he will soon be dead.

He was certain that his passing would hardly be noted.
But while the rest of the staff took the flatline in stride,
the nurse’s aide, a Philly girl, sat down where no one had,
in the never pulled-up chair, right next to the empty bed.

She bid him Good Night and wished him stars in his sky.
Eyes closed, she felt his presence, and paused for a breath,
fondly remembering his face, calmly embracing his grace –
before rising, then looking back, with a last wink and a smile.

¹ She somehow knew that in passing, he found what he had missed.
  Because the girl who touched the spirit of the man
  without a wife was, unknown to both,
  his only child.