Giving Over

When you were young and among

Your own kind, since whoever

One is among when that young

Tend to become one, one’s own,

There was the frequent advice

People gave to each other

To give it over to God.

Now you consider cancer,

Its wild enthusiasm

To keep living large, larger,

A sybaritic rock star,

A Samson chained and eager

To achieve sufficient strength

To pull down the whole palace

On everyone and Samson,

And you consider Wiman,

Angel of faith with cancer,

Patient with God and cancer,

Profiled in The New Yorker,

As God blinks out brain by brain.

Such an optimistic man.

What if God’s got the cancer?

If God’s own brains are feeding

On whatever’s remaining,

Brain by brain and cell by cell,

More mad enthusiasm

For living, growing larger?

You gave it over to God,

And now God’s dying of it,

Gone, one day, all together.