Two winters after a mother's illness, a son stands in a sweltering Alabama yard and cannot stop looking back. Thomas McAfee's "In Time of Sickness" is a poem about memory arriving in pieces: a hospital room, a honey-colored shawl, a bus ride, a line from a newspaper. The center of it is a confession of helplessness. The speaker could not cure his mother, could not even fully attend to her, and now the season has turned without him noticing what it took away.
The opening lines set up the poem's central tension between seasons and bodies. "A kind of wintry, wary / Spring" is Alabama weather, but it also describes the mother's situation, cautious and unsure whether anything will bloom. McAfee lets the flowers do the emotional work. Camellias will open next month, then jonquils, "then anything could happen / As far as flowers were concerned." The phrase has a wry, offhand ring, yet it hides a grim question: could anything happen as far as the mother was concerned? The poem never says she died, and the closing section's address to "your winter days" suggests she may have, though that is an inference from the text, not a stated fact. What the poem insists on is that she yearned for her garden while lying in a "dinky room" with "Tranquility-gray" walls. That compound is a small masterpiece of bitter irony, a hospital's idea of peace turned into a color nobody would choose.
The details around her are tender and specific. The shawl is "hand-knitted" and "the color of honey," the only warm thing in the room. The gardener, who "talked to himself; so what?", is paid "seventy-five cents an hour," and the poem remembers that he learned "the art of hoe and shears" over "many years, / many words." Here the mother appears as a teacher and a worker, someone who invested patience in another person. The parenthetical aside, with its defensive "so what?", sounds like the mother's own voice slipping into the poem.
The second stanza lurches away from the hospital, and the jolt is deliberate. The speaker, "broke" at Easter and ignorant of the "ritual story," rides a Greyhound bus that "moaned through the wind," a nicely tired image for both the vehicle and the passengers. Sleeping faces are "brief," a single word that makes strangers into emblems of mortality. Then comes a darkly comic moment: a "smutty newspaper" claims emotion "could now be applied like a facial lotion." Against the real feeling of a dying parent, the cheap promise of packaged emotion is almost obscene. The stanza ends with the poem's sharpest couplet: "New Year! cut the adder's head in two! / I'm poisoned with fear. I'm poisoned with love too." The snake image suggests a wish to destroy fear, but the speaker admits the venom is already in him, and in a startling turn, love is counted as a poison alongside fear. Love here is what makes the helplessness unbearable.
Formally, the poem is built on rhymed couplets that loosen as the poem goes on, with slant and near rhymes like "shawl" and "walls," "burst" and "worst," and the final pair "ferns" and "burns." The lines are long, loosely metered, and conversational, so the couplets feel less like song than like a voice that keeps catching itself on a chime. The lopsided rhymes seem to mimic grief's refusal to resolve cleanly. The final section, set apart and indented, shrinks to a few lines and flips the weather: where the earlier scenes were cold, now "Summer scolds / The yard," verbena droops, and "the sky burns." The word "scolds" is wonderfully human, as if nature itself were reproaching the speaker, who confesses he is "incompetent as ever." The ferns "fawning" for water echo the mother's old yearning, and the poem ends on the speaker failing, or about to fail, to tend what she loved.
What makes the poem memorable is its refusal to console. It offers no epiphany, only an unflattering self-portrait and a garden going dry. The strange gaps and leaps between hospital, bus, and lawn make grief feel the way it actually behaves: not a story but a scatter of vivid, stubborn images.