Sonnet for H and C

Love is not all: it is not meat nor drink
Nor slumber nor a roof against the rain;
Nor yet a floating spar to men that sink
And rise and sink and rise and sink again;
Love can not fill the thickened lung with breath,
Nor clean the blood, nor set the fractured bone;
Yet many a man is making friends with death
Even as I speak, for lack of love alone.

It well may be that in a difficult hour,
Pinned down by pain and moaning for release,
Or nagged by want past resolution's power,
I might be driven to sell your love for peace,
Or trade the memory of this night for food.
It well may be. I do not think I would.

Edna St. Vincent MillayI thought of this as I watched our friends agonize over worrisome questions emerging through the opaque morass that is the Chinese public health system, about the little boys that they desperately want to love and raise as their own.

Love may not be all. But sometimes it makes everything else bearable.

My thoughts go out tonight to my dear friends. I can do no more than hope for the love you want to be true.