#WordyAndWheelyWednesdays: For Ania and EUvryone

Hello my lovely readers

This week's offering from my poem a day project is one I wrote on Saturday in an attempt to process my feelings post-Brexit. It's a sort of thank you note to my many European PAs, particularly those who supported me throughout my time away at university, and is dedicated to the memory of our lovely Ania (especially apt in the week of World Cancer Day). She's pictured with me in the featured photo, helping me hold the biggest loaf of tiger bread either of us had ever encountered, so we could send evidence to another PA (remember that, Bee?).

01/02/2020

'Home/EU':

Staring at a Student Finance England

screen; no matter how frustrating

the situation seemed, I summoned a smile

at the subtle yet significant forward slash.

Because it really summed up my status.

I was a UK citizen and student, but

my Cerebral Palsy meant that studying  

was only possible thanks to my mostly

European PAs, and it was them

being there that let me make

my undergrad halls a home.

Lots of the best working relationships

are founded on a mutual language -

and we had several. A cacophony

of code-switching conversations,

where every sentence made sense

and, if not, the team translated together.

I knew my linguistic needs were niche -

I only learnt l'escaliers* in A Level French,

yet could ask for l'ascenseur** or kinésithérapie***

before I turned twelve - but, at uni,

the word 'straw' taught me about nuance:

paille, paie, cannucia (not paglia), słomka.

We all felt safer with this sort of slippage.

Avoiding English aided privacy in public,

and even my fellow Brits preferred BSL****

when asking awkward questions.

For us, plurality was productive,

full of pleasure and promise...

...and gave me peace when I was in pain.

French, Romanian, Italian or Polish lullabies

sung softly, as I lay beseiged by my spasms

bringing sleepless night upon sleepless night.

Lifelong nicknames forged from fumbled words,

making mirth through misunderstanding tight muscles.

Of course our mini-populace wasn't purely European;

we were an African and an Asian diaspora as well.

But the ten week terms and easy travel arrangements

were especially enticing to our continental cousins.

They got a brief adventure in exchange for helping me

venture to the far-off lands of lectures...and the loo.

Yes, there were tricky times too,

when we were all too tired to talk

in any of our many mother tongues.

But then we sat in silent solidarity,

togetherness tiding us over until

we could find our united voices again.

That strategy has served with

those who stayed longer than a term,

and those others who now help me at home.

But the plethora of people who once popped up

in answer to adverts like mine has,

since 2016, been steadily dwindling.

I can't blame them. I know what it is

to feel vulnerable, unsure of basic rights,

even in an undeniably privileged society.

But I also know that the tangible care

of these fabulous folk from across the Channel 

takes the edge off some of my uncertainty.

And isn't that exactly the sort of exchange

the Union was specifically set up to promote?

I don't think there's a word, in all of

my gladly-gleaned vocabulary, to express

my despair at the state of things.
For them. For me. For us.

So I won't try to tell you how it hurts.

Instead, I'll end entirely differently,

and go with gratitude; for the freedom given 

by a gaggle of giggling young women.

I cherish the connection of our countries.

Grazie. Dziękuję. Mulțumesc. Merci.

* 'the stairs'

** 'the lift'

*** 'physiotherapy'

**** British Sign Language

Me - a white person with short brown hair and brown eyes, wearing a blue striped top - sitting in my powered wheelchair and smiling as I hold a giant loaf of "tiger" bread. Next to me is Ania - a white woman with long brown hair and greenish eyes, who is also smiling as she leans down to put her arm around my shoulder. We are in the kitchen of my student halls, which has white and silver cupboards on the wall, set above blue and white tiles.

#WordyAndWheelyWednesdays: On really being 28

Hello my lovely readers

I haven't written one of these particular posts for quite a few years. However, I always mark what we call my 'zero birthday', whether I write about it or not. So, as I'm still trundling with my poem a day project, and the date happens to fall on a Wednesday this year, I thought today I'd share a sonnet with my thoughts on what prematurity means to me, and how it feels 'really being twenty-eight', exactly eleven weeks after my 'actual' November birthday.

A sonnet because it's my safest form, and because Shakespeare writes about Richard III being premature - he was 'sent before [his] time'.

The picture below is of me, as a baby, with my dad.

29/01/2020

This poem's penned with thoughts of 'little' me,

who really was the essence of that word,

a sugar bag's worth of humanity -

and yet had lungs which screamed out to be heard.

She made her entrance nigh on three months early

(a habit I've kept up throughout our life).

This left our brain and body a bit whirly;

but did it help us thrive or give us strife?

That query's one I still find hard to answer

in some ways more now I am twenty-eight

and today makes me wish that I could ask her

her thoughts on how we've travelled to that age.

Was this the yearly passage she had planned,

laying cocooned within our Papa's hands?

Me as a very small premature baby in hospital, nestled in my father's arms. He - a white person with dark hair and a dark beard - is wearing a navy blue jumper and lighter jeans, and sitting in a chair in front of some hospital equipment. I have a very small babygrow on, and medical tape across my nose to secure a feeding tube.

 

#WordyAndWheelyWednesdays: Poetry on the passing of time

Hello my lovely readers

Firstly, thank you for the very kind responses to last week's post and the poem for Jane. Secondly, following on from that, I've been thinking a lot about the passage of time. I took that as the topic for my poem on Monday, because the date happened to be the twentieth day of the first month of the year two thousand and twenty. And I'm writing a poem a day, which means I'm very much marking time.

So here, along with love and spoons, is what turned out to be (only) my second haiku of this project:

20/01/2020

Is time moving us,

or is it us moving time?

And can we know which?

#WordyAndWheelyWednesdays: A poem for Jane, fifteen years on

Hello my lovely readers

A very short preamble to this week's post, because I'm uploading it whilst staving off exhaustion after a very long long-haul flight home from South Africa. I'm trying to ensure I wait for bed 'til a sensible time, though, despite being two hours ahead. I also really wanted to post this poem. It's one I  wrote on Sunday 12th, to mark our school Occupational Therapist, Jane's, fifteenth anniversary. She had a very significant impact on me, and I wanted to honour that. So, without further ado, and love and spoons until next week:

12/01/2020

Young teenage me wrote you a poem too.

It got stuck on the memorial wall –

one of those gaudily bright display places

more appropriate to primary than secondary.

But I guess that’s what ‘special’ schools are.

I guess as well that I was still a kid,

not yet blasé about bereavement.

You were only number four, after all,

although my first adult. Yet, well, so young

and such a spiritual sister it still felt wrong.

I couched my confusion in Comic Sans

and clichés; a premade border of butterflies

built into Microsoft Word the inane inspiration

for metaphors to numb my muddled mind.

A guide for my grief now one of my guides was gone.

The picture is still clear – the poem, the border,

its place on the board, the background brightness.

Even the schoolgirl slope of my once favourite font.

But, though the type is vivid, almost violently so,

I can’t fathom the words it formed.

After a decade and a half, that feels just about okay.

How would several simple sentences have held

my gratitude for what you gave me?

How could little lines convey what it meant

that you took my meanings seriously?

How it felt, in an environment

so innocuously yet insidiously infantilising,

that you honoured our emerging adolescence,

in activities, but above all attitude?

How then the spark of my spirit was snuffed out with yours?

Our sessions stretched beyond

seating systems and special cutlery.

Less Occupational Therapy; more

an Opportunity to Talk about Travel.

The places we’d been, where we each wanted to go.

I was in awe of your plans for India,

then on tenterhooks after the tsunami –

but you came back, and were brimming

with stories, until an untimely lorry

sent you, and all of us, spinning.

There was neither rhyme nor reason in that;

and so I end with none.

#WordyAndWheelyWednesdays: Barefoot Bravery

Hello my lovely readers

As promised, here is the second weekly post in relation to my poem a day project. I've now written eight poems in 2020, and thirty-nine since I started Seasonal Sonnets at the beginning of December. Today I'm only sharing one, though, because this one took some doing - not only the writing, but the activity that inspired it.

Yesterday I went barefoot in public for the first time in years. I had to, because it was super hot. But I have a difficult relationship with my feet, so, um, well... Still, I've set a goal to be more body positive, and that's what this poem is about. It isn't my best, but it's more an experiment in form than content. I'm hoping it looks a little like the strange contours of my feet, of which there is a picture below.

07/01/2020

Heat got the better
of my body
so there was
nothing for it
but
to go
barefoot;
which gets the better
of my bravery
because
confidence
                  like
                         that 
                                takes
                                          courage.

 
(Image description: My legs in my teal corduroy dungarees - ill-chosen yesterday because the weather changed dramatically and unexpectedly mid-afternoon - with my bare feet perched on the footplates of my wheelchair. They are purple in colour, as my circulation is questionable, and my toes are wonky. My empty teal shoes are balanced between my footplates and the ground.)

#WordyAndWheelyWednesdays: A Haiku for Hope

Hello my lovely readers

Well, now we're in 2020, which means Seasonal Sonnets is over - but my poem a day project continues. Although I won't be posting them every day, it just so happens that the year has begun on a Wednesday. I thought I'd mark that by publishing my poem for today, and returning to the old custom of Wordy and Wheely Wednesdays. It's a haiku (as I imagine quite a few of my verses this year will be) and it's for hope. It's inspired by the fact that I'm starting the year in SA, and what that means.

I know moments like this can be filled with complex emotions - they certainly are for me, which is why I couldn't quite manage to do a decade, or even year, in review post. But hope is something I try to keep hold of, and I think it's needed right now.

So, here is my haiku, along with love and spoons, and of course solidarity, as we trundle through the start of this new year together. I dedicate it to my dearest Gramma, whose birthday is today, and who has taught me a lot about hope throughout my life - and also to my friend Hope, who has a birthday too and is a political powerhouse. It's accompanied by a light drawing I did. This one, on a black surface, is a kaleidoscopic pattern of entwined purple and turquoise. There are crisscrossed lines in each colour in the background and in the foreground the pattern creates something similar to a rose or (perhaps contrastingly) a snowflake. For me it's an image of growth and newness, but also how perspective can create different responses to the same situation. I hope it evokes something similar for you, and I wish you the best for your year.

Jx

01/01/2020

Hope is in my heart,

subtle but steady, as this

year starts in summer