Refuge
by Ingrid Andersson
There are two means of refuge...in life—music and cats.
-Nobel Peace Prize recipient, Albert Schweitzer
You could say my father’s heart
was doomed from the beginning,
in utero, in the years when doctors
advised cigarettes for hysteria.
Mild child, my father was named
on the eve of the second world
war: Alfred, meaning all peace.
All night last night, his body fought
for breath, rattled his brittle bars
of rib, sternum, collar bone, his given
hopefulness. This morning, like a mirror,
a television on the wall tells us
all we already know but remain
unready for: Earth beaten, beats
back, war begets war, and my
mother, love of his life, battles
her own looping. I am trying to re-name
late-stage congestive heart failure
to something less about personal failing,
more about this cage
we keep going round in. I open a link
sent by a friend in the blue hour
and hold it up to him—a musician
in the Middle East, playing piano
in a kind of parallel intensive care
unit, in a universe ecstatic with cats.
A tabby caresses the man’s beaming face,
a ginger noses the man's noble cheek.
Many stripes of suffering purr their
salvaged hearts out to his music
and sun floods in, as my father breathes.
Copyright 2023 by Ingrid Andersson
Ingrid Andersson’s debut collection, Jordemoder: Poems of a Midwife (Holy Cow! Press, 2022) was short-listed as best book of poetry for 2023 by the Wisconsin Library Association and won an Edna Meudt book award. Andersson’s poems have been nominated for Pushcart Prizes and Best of the Net and selected as Editor’s Choice award (Eastern Iowa Review). Her work has appeared in About Place Journal, ArsMedica, Intima, Literary Mama, Midwest Review, Midwifery Today, Minerva Rising, Plant-Human Quarterly, Wisconsin People & Ideas, and elsewhere. Andersson practices as a home birth nurse midwife and activist in Madison, WI. Here is Youtube link to the Middle East music teacher.
