Maria Sabina
When Maria Sabina died,
someone twisted the neck
of a rooster and laid it
by her side. On the fourth
day, not the third or the fifth,
its spirit rose up and crowed,
calling her soul to depart,
to start its journey
to the Dead Land,
feeding on squash seeds,
greens and fruit along the way.
Someone lit two candles at her feet.
And on the fourth, not the third day
or the fifth, her soul rose
and folded a palm cross
in the fingers of her right hand
as it lay across her breast.
She followed the rooster to rest,
dressed not in fine powder
on the wings of a butterfly
but naked, without shoes,
through cow fields and cold streams.
She was neither thirsty nor hungry.
On that day, in a single moment
of the moon, she felt fresh.
Gene Hirsch is a retired academic geriatrician who, for many years, has taught human values in patient care to medical students and doctors, recently at a hospice, with dying people.
He initiated and has taught in the writing program at John C. Campbell Folk School, Brasstown, NC, since 1992, when he co-founded NC Writers' Network West. He conducts seminars on subjects such as Expressing Human Need and Emotion, The Influence of Existential Meaning for the Poet.
Gene's poetry has been published in medical and non-medical journals such as: Pharos (Medical Honor Society), Journal of the American Medical Society, Consortium Ethics Program, Univ. of Pittsburgh, Fetishes (Univ. of Colorado), Hiram Poetry Review, Human Quest, and the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Anthologies include Atahita Journal, Blood & Bone (poems by physicians), Behavioral Medicine, Crossing Limits (Afro-American and Jewish poets), Tyranny of the Normal, and Echoes across the Blue Ridge. He produced five volumes of Freeing Jonah (poets of western NC). He is a member of the Pittsburgh Poetry Exchange.
