MEETING MY STEM CELL DONOR | Dianne Silvestri
They kept your name
from me for a year.
Even then, not ready,
I sought real survival.
At last I wrote you.
By return mail you sent
a photo of you grinning while
reclining through the harvest
of your cells to be flown
on ice to me, nearly empty
of life, bleached clean
of resistance.
Six years later, on a mid-
June morning, I swung wide
my front door to you,
taller than I’d expected,
smiling, extending a full
grip of white and fuchsia-pink
long-stemmed peonies
to celebrate our bond.
How oddly casual,
your consent years ago
for a swab of your cheek
to have your chromosome
mapped, in case someday
it might match someone
desperate to live.
Dianne Silvestri, poet and physician, is author of But I Still Have My Fingerprints (CavanKerry Press, 2022), which recounts her journey to recovery from leukemia and stem cell transplantation. Her poems have appeared in her chapbook Necessary Sentiments, JAMA, JAMA Oncology, American Journal of Nursing, Journal of Radiology Nursing, The Healing Muse, The Examined Life Journal of the Carver College of Medicine, Pulse, Barrow Street, Main Street Rag, Naugatuck River Review, Evening Street Review and elsewhere. Several of her recent works reflect on people close to her receiving critical diagnoses. Since retirement from medicine, she advocates for medical humanities through speaking and teaching.