Prose: Grandmother.

Swamp Cottonwood - Populus heterophylla
Height: to 80' Spread: 40-50' Habit / Form: Upright /  Hardy to USDA Zone 3

your hair now
almost touching the river, 
your leaning
just that much more, 
tonight, with the newest rain
and i still sense no weariness 
in your stance.

grandmother tree
leads my mind into water,
brown flowing water
colored more then once
by the blood of slaves.

what you must know
have seen felt turned away from
having as you surely do
a soul a heart a spirit worth saving.

versus them, they
who know who they are
would never talk to you, grandmother
frightened purveyors of hate
not up the task 
of even being human.

unable to care for anything
but their 
selfish 
black 
hearts

machiavellian afterbirth
that they are
as bad as any demon
lasting in the swamps of the deep south.

dumb deaf and blind
out of touch
disconnected 
and unable to feel
the pain and suffering of those around them

unable to speak even to themselves
much less a tree.

(copyright PJ Reed 2012)

Pervaiz Akhter
Primary attending psychiatrist
1986-2015. 

As to this man. I well recall sitting in conversation with him, supposed medical consultation. We were at a patio table, outside of the Palo Verde Unit, ASH, and a cicada was making a racket immediately over our heads. It was summer, hot, and only he and I talking.  I took moment to look for the insect, and Akhter asked me, as though perplexed and seeking more illegitimate terms specific to my diagnosis, "What are looking at?" I told him, "the cicada", and he still looked befounded, in effect, so I added: 

"There, above your head, that noise. That's a cicada. 

You know, a locust."

It was strange, very strange indeed. This man, this so called medical doctor, utterly unaware of his surroundings. Looking at me as though I was the sick one. 

Yes, I was ill.... But this man.... He is devil in sheep's clothing. To me, that's sick. 

Very sick.

These are the kind of people 

we are talking about.

IN CLOSING: My maternal grandmother, Margaret Anne Sauers (nee' Mahoney) worked as a volunteer care provider in the Cook County, Ill., public hospital system, circa the 1930s and 1940s. This work took her for a time into units serving the interests and care needs of persons affected by mental illness and developmental disability. In a conversation we had not long before her passing in 1990, she said to me "Those places, those people.... the doctors, the nurses, they were horrible... you would not believe the things I have seen." 

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