the widow knows where the important papers are, but her fingers won’t work the lock.
And when my mother died, and I stood up, I found for a moment that I couldn’t walk.
So it was when I sat beside you in the room for the gravely ill,
and though I saw you wanted a sip of water, it was the nurse who had to lift the cup.
Patricia Hooper's poems have appeared in The Kenyon Review, Poetry, The Yale Review, The Atlantic, Gettysburg Review, The Southern Review and other magazines. A fifth book of poetry, Wild Persistence, was published in 2019 and awarded the Brockman Campbell Award for Poetry.
