A Birthday Card
by: Ted Kooser
from: One World at a Time
In her eighties now, and weak and ill
with emphysema, my aunt sends me
a birthday card—a tossing ocean
with clipper ship—and wishes me
well at forty-four. She’s included
a note—hard-bitten in ball-point,
with a pen that sometimes skips whole words
but never turns back—to tell me
her end of the news: how the steroids
have softened her spine, and now how
every x-ray shows more shattered bone.
Her hasty words skip in and out,
their little grooves washed clean of ink,
the message rising and falling
like short-wave radio, sending
this hurried SOS, with love.
