Anne watches Casablanca
A poem for Academy Award Season 2026
She watches Casablanca again,
the hospital room dim except for that soft, silver light
that once lit up the world before either of us had names for love.
Maybe she holds on to it now
because the old films never rush –
they let longing breathe,
let lovers part and return
in a rhythm life rarely grants.
She leans toward the screen as if remembering
how our hands found the other in the dark
decades ago,
as if Bogart’s gravelled promise
carries every vow we whispered across forty-seven years.
In the flicker of black‑and‑white,
perhaps she sees not a past she missed
but the story she lived,
the one where I was her Rick,
and she was never asked to get on that plane.
https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/great-movie-casablanca-1942
As her illness progresses, Anne finds herself irresistibly drawn to vintage Hollywood movies, watching them obsessively for hours in her palliative care hospital bed as if the grainy black‑and‑white worlds held a frequency only her changing mind could decode. Perhaps the old films offer a kind of temporal sanctuary: stories fixed in time, untouched by the chaos unfolding in her own body. In the faces of long‑gone actors and the predictable rhythms of classic plots, she may sense a strange comfort, as though the past itself were reaching out, offering a steadier reel to hold onto while the present continues to blur and to dissipate.
Your friend,
Robert
https://robertmcbrydeauthor.com/
If you feel like keeping track of Anne’s cancer journey, I’m chronicling it in prose and poetry here:
https://robertmcbrydeauthor.com/news/
