poems about sickness

2 posts

Poems About Sickness

my poems poetry The Indifferent World

In the northeast, summer’s approaching its landing strip and everyone seems to be sneezing and coughing. Mostly colds. Some early-bird flus. And the occasional, will-it-never-end occurrence of Covid. Luckily, I’m only dealing with a minor oh-so-common cold, but it’s slowed me down with its favored weapon, the sinus headache.

So instead of some deep, thoughtful, controversial, mind-provoking (all right, enough with the thesaurus) post, today I offer up a poem from my first collection, The Indifferent World.

It’s about the brothers common and cold when they stay too long, and you know what Mark Twain (or was it Ben Franklin?) once said about guests: Like fish, they begin to stink in three days.

 

Head Cold
by Ken Craft

The head stands amazed,
harboring labyrinths of lead,

Minotaur of mucus
struggling to ford rivers

that forgot their flow.
Mythical horns scratch

glyphs across the sinal
Lascaux, itching,

yearning for escape
through impassable passages:

eyes branched in red
lightning, nose non-negotiable,

mouth agog and dug dry
with rhythmic rushes of air.

 

Whew. I am impressed with my allusions (Lascaux? Really?) and especially with my vocabulary (I’m looking up “glyphs” again even as I type). But I get the idea. The head is occupied by some virus, and the virus is making itself feel at home, like some squatter acting with impunity (think of an Orange Cheeto in the White House).

The question is, does writing about sickness make you feel better? It forces you to think about your malady, and all the evidence is at hand (or in the head) for material to write about, so I say it’s a definite maybe. And no, it’s not a cure, but it’s a mighty distraction, and distraction is a popular thing these days (usually as compensation for the daily authoritarian news).

Conclusion: If you’re feeling ill, write about it. Then sanitize the keyboard, won’t you? It’s only polite.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Poems of Sickness and Hope

poetry reading poetry

Prayer. It has religious connotations, of course, but the word is big-tent and willing to accommodate any plea to any higher force. Prayer can simply be a wish in hope’s clothing.

In the poem “Prayer,” Keetje Kuipers uses the second-person point of view with the pronoun “you.” Some readers object to this because “you” can mean an actual someone else and “you” can also mean a narrator addressing herself.

Me, I have no problem with it because, in my opinion, it works the way the reader wants it to work. That is, it gives the sense that a speaker may be referring to me personally, to everyone in the world, or to herself only. All good.

As for “Prayer,” it could be categorized as a sickness poem or a mother poem. But really, the two can be interpreted as one. Memories of mothers caring for us in childhood run strong. Deep as a tap root — so strong and deep that many people, delirious on their deathbeds late in a long life, call out for their mothers, even if that mother has been dead for too many decades to recall.

Both sad and haunting, that. But for now, let us pray:

 

Prayer
Keetje Kuipers

Perhaps as a child you had the chicken pox
and your mother, to soothe you in your fever
or to help you fall asleep, came into your room
and read to you from some favorite book,
Charlotte’s Web or Little House on the Prairie,
a long story that she quietly took you through
until your eyes became magnets for your shuttering
lids and she saw your breathing go slow. And then
she read on, this time silently and to herself,
not because she didn’t know the story,
it seemed to her that there had never been a time
when she didn’t know this story—the young girl
and her benevolence, the young girl in her sod house—
but because she did not yet want to leave your side
though she knew there was nothing more
she could do for you. And you, not asleep but simply weak,
listened to her turn the pages, still feeling
the lamp warm against one cheek, knowing the shape
of the rocking chair’s shadow as it slid across
your chest. So that now, these many years later,
when you are clenched in the damp fist of a hospital bed,
or signing the papers that say you won’t love him anymore,
when you are bent at your son’s gravesite or haunted
by a war that makes you wake with the gun
cocked in your hand, you would like to believe
that such generosity comes from God, too,
who now, when you have the strength to ask, might begin
the story again, just as your mother would,
from the place where you have both left off.