I wrote this poem in the time around the death of my wife’s paternal grandmother. She had dementia, which was quite severe in her last years. The poem isn’t meant to be about her personally or specifically; just about her type of situation.
Poems like this, where every line makes a rhyme, are really time-consuming to write. Good rhyme takes time. It’s hard to write with a normal voice, saying things that sound at least somewhat natural, making the poem say what you want; AND at the same time hitting your marks to rhyme at the end of each line. I returned to this poem off and on for over three months before considering it ‘done’. I probably wrote over a thousand minor versions of it before it got this far.
Long ago a teacher taught me: rhyme makes you think of new ways to say things; and those new ways to say things are a wellspring of poetry. So I prefer writing poems that rhyme. And most people prefer to read poems that rhyme. It just takes forever to write them.