#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

 

#SeasonalSonnets 2019: 31st December

Hello my lovely readers

Here is the last entry in this series for this year. However, rather than this being about the significance of the final day of December, my focus is on how it feels more like a mid-point than either an ending or a beginning.

And that message is most properly conveyed through the theme of music.

Tonight we're going to the Botanical Gardens at Kirstenbosch for their New Year's Eve concert. One of the bands featured is Freshlyground, who I've loved since I was a young teen, but have never seen live because I haven't made it home to SA for ages (as if I needed to say that one more time, hehe). I'm so thrilled - not least because this is their last gig as a group. The thought of getting to be even a small part of that bittersweet event fills me with joy. Their music has got me through some of the trickiest times in my life, and also provided the soundtrack for some of the most special, from the earlier sounds of Jika Jika and Nomvula right up to the most recent vibe of Can't Stop. It feels so apt that, at the end of a decade which has been characterised by difficult but determined physical and emotional recovery, I finally get to listen live, at home, and say, 'I did it!'. I got here, both literally and metaphorically - and I'm ready to move forward further.

I'm more grateful to this group of wonderful musicians than these waffly words can convey.

It's also been an honour to be here to witness the start of the lovely lead vocalist, Zolani Mahola's, solo career as a singer and storyteller. So this sonnet is a shout out to her too, as thanks for her cross-continental creative solidarity, our impromptu dance party a couple of weeks ago, and the reminder to be brave and bold in the tales we tell to the world.

31st December 2019

This poem celebrates the strength of song;

how music offers meaning to our life.

Both joy when things are right and help when wrong -

a soundtrack for our glee as much as strife.

Sometimes it is the wisdom in the words,

which touch a special chord within our souls,

and others, still, a beat or tune we've heard

prompts movement in our way (for me, a roll!).

And often, it's a blend of both of these,

where melody's a perfect match with lyrics,

that offers us such profound poetries

and lets the song find fusion in our spirits.

The latter kind's the work of Freshlyground

and I'll always be glad they've been around.

(My blog is refusing to embed a video from their official YouTube channel, so here's a link to my favourite of their newest songs, 'Makes Me Happy'.)

#SeasonalSonnets 2019: 30th December

Hello my lovely readers

Here we are at the penultimate entry of this series, and also my penultimate poem of 2019. So I thought, as a lot of them have been about achievements - and particularly 'bigger' ones like flying and surfing - I'd use today's to write about a 'smaller' one that is in some ways the most significant.

I've had a fear of falling out of bed since I was about ten. It got worse in my mid-teens. It means that my beds at home, and at the universities I've been to, have sides to help me feel safe. It also means that, a little ironically, I feel most secure in sleep when I'm camping, because I'm on the floor. (You might ask, at this point, why I don't just always sleep on the floor - and the answer is that it's a lot of effort for other people to get me there.)

You can imagine that this fear could cause complications on holiday - especially on one where we've been staying in several different places. In fact, I worked out this morning that I've slept in eight beds so far. They haven't had sides, so we've constructed barricades of various kinds from a combination of pillows, chairs and my wheelchair. I haven't always slept through, but that's been more because of discomfort than fear. I haven't always felt completely safe, either - our constructions inevitably aren't as solid as my side at home - but I've coped. And that feels great.

(Featured picture from a while back is me in bed at Hannah and Lynne's, with my snuggle buddy, their rescue cat)

30th December 2019

Today I'm thankful I've had restful sleep,

all whilst I've been in eight (eight!) different beds

and that we have discovered ways to keep

me feeling safe when often I'd be scared.

I'm not entirely sure what sparked this fear

and many people tell me it's irrational;

I know it feels real when it's here

and panic sends me off into a spiral.

There have been times like that during this trip

when my brain was convinced that I might fall

but somehow I've managed to cope with it

and not just sleep, but rest, and dream, and all.

To others it might seem like a 'small' thing -

to me it's the best gift this year could bring.