Ways of Being Blind
March 26 2022
From birth.
To me, this is unimaginable.
To slip
from a warm dark womb
into a cold abrasive world
that is just as dimensionless
and as unremittingly dark.
To only know your mother
by the power of scent
the sound of her voice.
To never gaze
on your lover's face,
able only to explore
by the touch of your hand
a tentative tongue.
To cultivate the 6th sense
that tells you who and where and what,
the ineffable presence
of a body in space.
To hear the colours named
and have no idea.
To never see yourself.
No matter how long
you stand in front of the mirror,
how hard
you look.
Or would it be worse
to be in possession of sight
just to see it go?
Until only a pinhole is left,
a black hole
collapsing in on itself.
Or to look straight ahead
and see nothing at all,
so time and again
you must turn your head
to catch just a glimpse
as the periphery shrinks
and the edge recedes.
Incrementally
and ineluctably
disappearing,
so all you can do
is savour the light
and hold the memories dear,
trying hard
not to let them die.
Or, as most of us are
wilfully blind;
seeing what we want to see
and ignoring the rest.
Or having the gift of sight
but failing to attend.
To the beauty of the world.
To things too big to grasp
without stepping back
and opening your eyes.
To the small things
you tend to hurry past
too fast, or distracted
to notice.
My apologies if this poem seems to focus too much on the “dis” part of disabled. I hope the last part somewhat redeems it. Because none of us are whole! And perhaps it's when those lacunes are our own fault and not due to fate or the accident of birth that the true moral stigma should fall.
Actually, I find it useful to remove the stigma of disability by thinking of myself as “temporarily abled”. As we all are. If nothing else, age does that. So, in a sense, the default becomes the state of loss; and our current state of ability becomes not only the exception, but far less taken for granted.
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