I sat until the screen-saver appeared

Because I could not allow the words to come near

The broken places buried within.

I fought frantic fear for words that rang true

As the asthmatic gasps, wheezing breaths

Hacking at fear as veins bulge blue.

Facing down fear of being misunderstood;

What origin the voice within that said that I could?

My middle-aged self tilting at windmills

With words to explain how we all come full-circle.

My adolescent dreams come face-to-face

With the reality of my chronically weakened state.

When I was a girl having my last doll-tea

What would I have thought of my grown-up, me?

This month I am sharing in the Tweetspeak Poetry book club. The featured selection is Megan Willome’s, The Joy of Poetry, part memoir, part poetry life-line.  The first six chapters begin with her experience of poetry and the battle her mother waged with cancer. She begins at thirteen, the year they both invaded her life.

Poetry took over my life a few years earlier. Thankfully, my mother did not develop cancer until I was a young adult. My Mother’s battle with cancer was nearly as swift as Willome’s mother’s was long. The shared suffering of a girl whose mother is dying of cancer, combatting the disease with words is one that helped form both Willome and myself.