Like The Surgeon's Knife--revision 2

[waitingforgodet]

Convalescing at home,
but I am not alone.
On my chest, St. John Keats.
His verse To Fanny piques
open his ravaged heart,
vies to heal by his art.

My right, Henry Thoreau.
Pens Walden Pond to show
he’d not conform and tries
to heal through nature’s eyes.
Whip-poor-wills help us cope.
The Woods will give us hope.

My left, Albert Camus.
Unmasks our milleau,
indicts us in The Fall
with our sickly call
for grins of subterfuge
gilded by modern rouge.

As I lie in this bed,
their words live in my head.
And like the Surgeon’s Knife
that saved my own short life.
What Fate that might have been.
No poems, books from them.