Lancing Glance

Poetry Tuesday - Tuesday 5/13
This year, Diabetes Blog Week and TuDiabetes are teaming up to bring out the poet in you! Write a poem, rhyme, ballad, haiku, or any other form of poetry about diabetes. After you’ve posted it on your blog, share it on the No Sugar Added® Poetry page on TuDiabetes, and read what others have shared there as well!

Poetry, the language of love.  People falling in love write poems on napkins.  Poems are recited at weddings.  Songs are lyrics.  My beautiful teenager suggested an acrostic poem with the word "glucose" for today's blog prompt.  I decided what I really wanted was a poem from my husband.  He's recited and written poetry from the first moment I met him when he wrote Rumi poems on napkins for me at Denny's what seems like ages and ages ago and is in fact around 20 years. He's talented.  (At least in my opinion.).   He has a way with words.  He's a philosopher.  He's funny.  He's sweet.  He's my best friend.  And he was the person I had to call from the ER at Children's hospital first.  He was devastated.  He has diabetes (type 2).  He understands.  He is our rock.  He loves his boy.

  And he wrote this:

Lancing Glance

He puts a hand out, reaching, hungry
it is a hand that's riddled with scars too small to see
never free, the need to bleed in order to feed
louder each time we do this.

I take the hand, and it is warm, or cold
a first hint of how he feels to me
the tangible connection the reading silently 
from his body's subtle book of clues

I run through steps I know I have taken a hundred times.
I walk through them as if for the first time, and I don't keep count.
No, I do count everything, always a measure to be made.
Love is math now too. Math that gives life. Love Math.

In the aftermath, he skips away to eat his body full of sweetness
needing more sweetness, needing to battle sweetness, but always sweetness.
His laughter belies none of this, his laughter denies none of this.
His laughter defies all of this.

All I can see sometimes is a thousand red dots 
on a thousand torn pieces of tissue.
Some of them are shaped like hearts from 
the way I pinch them from the paper towel.

And then that world of mine screaming injustice inside my head
falls utterly silent in the growing smile on a boy's face
as he sees something funny or hears some funny joke and
I know there are a countless billion more red dots inside, and because of them,
because of him and his bold amazing brilliant smile, we are unafraid.