Are You Ill Sharon

(Sonnet)

In limbo locked, somewhere 'twixt life and death,
Sharon is lying in living purgatory,
Half-functioning and laboring for each breath,
Bordering the brink of annexed territory.
In comatose condition Coleridge feared --
"Fettered from flight, with nightmare sense of fleeing" --
Bethlehem's butcher the abyss hath peered
Where souls are neither being nor unbeing.
Standing in slime upon on a sickening shore,
His fate afearing of perpetual night,
The foul fiends' fiefdom, and the furies' law,
He has the ferryman of Styx in sight.
Yet what outcome's more fitting for his worth
Who proved himself Hell's minister on earth?

January 2006