91 female, white, widowed, metastatic cancer of the lungs, terminal, <24 hrs

This is really cool. I like your sharp use imagery. Very specific, and well chosen. Sometimes it's hard to pick which images to use, and I think you have a knack for sifting out the important moments and stitching them together.

One thing that you might try as an exercise is to see what happens when you eliminate the adjectives from your piece. Given the frank nature of this piece, I felt some places might tighten up well without the descriptive fluff. For example:

She smelled something like sickly-sweet menthol.

becomes

She smelled something like menthol.

To me it's less lofty— and to be honest "sickly-sweet menthol" is puzzling for me to imagine, whereas "menthol" is crystal clear.

So yeah, this is not so much like "your piece would be so much better if x" but more just something to play with as you edit and write more.

Overall your piece, again is packed with such great specifics, it totally paints the picture. "Right up to her neck" is a great one. That's the kind of image that shows rather than tells, and it makes me think.

One last consideration I would suggest: think about cutting the two lines between "twice as brilliant" and "she died…" leaving:

The shine of youth replaced with a glow;
not quite so bright, but twice as brilliant.

She died later that afternoon right before sunset.

I suggest this because those two lines, while interesting, bring us away from the image of glow and brilliance— and I think the last line, being about a sunset, will hit harder when directly juxtaposed with your image of a brilliant glow.

So yeah, I really liked this. I liked how frank it was. Your choice of details were great. I would look at adjectives, but there was nothing glaring about them. And I think your topic in general was interesting and kept me reading until the end. Hope something I said helps! Thanks for sharing.

I agree with everything u/pianoslut said. In addition, I'd like to add that the repetition of "sweet" throughout is effective, I can imagine her as the doting grandmother I never had. Excellent imagery and an excellent poem. Thank you for sharing your beautiful words!

u/pianoslut said it best with the use of "sickly-sweet menthol" being used oddly, however I do disagree with their notion of it being implied with the word menthol itself. The use of the word "sweet" was a wonderful way to capture the lady's personality with just one word while describing everything else, so the removal of the word sickly would suffice just fine! Other than this nitpick, I love the way this poem was written. I believe the way that the lines in each stanza are broken up, the poem reads smoothly and rhythmically. A short and sweet piece.

I love this title so much. It's strange and beautiful and journalistic and I think it would be really cool if you wrote a collection of poems about people from hospice dying with titles like this one. I love the tone of the piece- it's very gentle and caring and you can tell you really cared about your patient. I love "a flute of champagne", "the shine of youth".

I think you could parse down a few words- like "half-whispered as I announced..." instead of "half-whispered in reply". Or "her delicate smile beaming" instead of "a smile adorned her delicate face". It would match the sunset imagery as well!

I love the tone and the content. It's elegiac and sad and touching. And I would love if it if you kept posting poems in this style! Not too many hospice nurses have written poetry to my knowledge and it's a peek into a world that is rich for touching, meaningful art on death and those who deal with it everyday. This poem was a very refreshing and beautiful piece of work to read.

I figured it was a typo at first, but the more I look at it, "the preached man/ waived his hand" works really well. It plays on the similarity between waiving and waving things away, as if mortality were a waiver, so to speak. In this sense we all waive our right to understanding the "why" which can ostensibly be characterized as "the good news" of most religious origin stories.

I also enjoy the "flute of champagne" line--it reminds of a Fluyt and instead of seeing one play out there drunkeness, it belies much more of naval sense of a captaincy--riding the wave (or is it waive?) rather than dying in it. Before my reading eyes I see an terminally-ill woman transformed into a musician or a captain living in the moment even if that means she will die the next.

These little poetic moments of connection are why I read, write and love poetry.