Chronic Illness & Disability – Page 3 – Antonia Sara Zenkevitch

The Jade Quill

Life

between

sheets of dreams

knowing none know

where my tides convene

at breaker’s edge, the brow

transformed in the under-toe;

Bitter and Sweet

Bitter and sweet,

Zest, pith and pip,

The sun on my back,

The tang on my lips,

In wide blue horizons

I silently slip,

In old cobbled streets

Where kind strangers live,…

Experience I will not speak about the greens Painting the sky with varied hues, I will not draw rose thorns To try to show you Or talk of the riot Of violets and blues, Quietly, I will close my eyes And experience this with you, Where you walk unseeing Yet surely between soft lines Of…

40 Fragments

I cannot count them, these broken pieces of possibility.

But they haunt me, oh, days cantering by they do,

and I am whirlwind in a storm box,

High Street Quatern:

I know the high street’s doing great, Why would you require our custom? Don’t try to mend that broken lift, It’s forever since it broke down. I know your workers’ jobs are safe; I know the high street’s doing great, Why would you let me look inside? Bar all ‘disabled’ doors with crates. Make…

Shit-Sock Sonnet (a political satire)

“Roll up! Hear the latest reports from our government,” A homeless man on a park bench gleefully shouts, “Woman in wheelchair throws shit-socks at parliament!” “She said it was for the country’s good, She’d ensured the more decent MPs weren’t about, Roll up! Hear the latest reports from our government, “No one believed her;…

To Speak

I have learnt to speak;

I have learnt to speak in silence when my voice was gone,

in mimes, memes and gesticulations with one arm,

I have learnt to speak in rhythms when my limbs were

free,

I have learnt to speak within the forms my body allows me,

I learnt to speak again,

again,

again,
….

if and when

my voice is gone

as voices one day do,

when they speak of all I’ve done

I hope they’ll say this too;

I learnt to speak.

To Remain Me

To Remain Me I paint freedom past restrictions, Admiring the contradictions My love sees creativity Within my skill to remain me, Gone are the forms I knew before, Yet I’m still a dancer at core; I dance with words now, to be free Within my skill; to remain me, He speaks of how I master…

To All I was Before (poem)

I often speak of all I was before, Those ghosts carried ever in my casement, Echoing, like the voices of the wars I traversed, yet now I feel displacement, Life in pause, forbidden summits, woods, shores, Shops, parties, pavements, Vanished continents, consonants, confidence, The family, colleagues; friends I see no more; Those ghosts carried…