Nocturne

Written for June, But Just as Timely for July

A Tale of Moonrise

Swiftly now the rising moon
brings the blessings of the night,
nocturne played for weary June,
melody both sad and bright.
After bitter daytime’s blight
comes a curve across the sky,
just a curve of yellow gleam,
just a promise, glowing high
above the shade where valleys lie.
All are shadows, all things seem
asleep with not a scrap of dream
till the darkness’ beating heart,
arching upward with each drum
of moments’ pulsing, go and come,
bring the life of night athwart
shadows’ dreaming in the swart
distance of the unseen, strum
serenades into the shade,
lilt and sweet. The darkness wakes,
watches moonrise, softly shakes
off the dreams that dusk had made,
dallies where the moonbeams swayed
round the moths and bats, and takes
delight in its still half-seen dance:
shadows, valley, moonbeams, all
night-blooms, bats, in blessed thrall
to the moon, which gleams a glance
upward, earthward, slips by chance
into clouds and darkness’ fall.
June night’s over far too soon.

---

Dear friends,

I feel I should give a bit of a personal update. Partially this is to explain my relative absence here, and partly it is just because I need to air my woes a little. I hope you all won’t mind that!

Some weeks ago I had to stop taking my main anti-migraine medication—the one I was taking daily to reduce frequency and severity. I started to write that this happened two months ago—it feels like that—but it was actually just as June began. Predictably enough, I have had a strong flare-up of headaches. I have not had a day without for the past twelve days.

So it has been difficult to do anything, think anything. With what I do have available, I can’t quite control the symptoms enough to keep abreast of things. Hence my absence last week, as well as the relative paucity of this week’s post.

What I seldom mention is another difficulty which my readers here will perhaps best understand. Aphasia, losing the ability to use words, would be problematic for anyone; but for someone who is heavily word-oriented, it is harrowing. The actual inability to find words or to articulate verbally lasts perhaps fifteen to thirty minutes at most for me, and it is often the first signal I have of impending trouble. By now I’ve learned to recognize it and the fact that it will pass. I’ve learned to pause and figure out how to best handle the additional symptoms I know will follow. It has become more a matter of frustration than of fear.

But the cognitive fog that follows can often envelop the entire episode, lasting hours and sometimes days. This is where the real brutality of the situaton lies. When it is fairly bad, I can sometimes still write very short form work. Often I cannot. Perhaps worse, I also lose the ability to read with comfort or, more frighteningly, with much comprehension. My eyes struggle to focus; if they do focus, my head hurts and my brain slogs. Everything dulls—even, to a degree, the awareness of pain.

Back in 2018 or 2019, when I was active on Medium, I ran onto an article about writing through chronic pain and fatigue. The article itself was very helpful, and responses to my comment (containing some question I can’t quite recall) were very encouraging and practical. They gave me not only the courage, but a sort of framework for working around the limitations I had been struggling with. I am so grateful. Though I can’t recall a single name and I no longer have the original article, my gratitude is still profound. This is what allowed me to continue writing despite increasingly severe symptoms.

I learned to accept that there will be some days when I cannot write. I learned that some days are better used to edit or do less intensively creative work. I learned that I am not the only writer who finds it best to work sitting up in bed, keeping the process as quiet and pain-free as possible. I had had to quit writing in a notebook some years before, due to a tremor that makes it impossible for me to write casually by hand. Fortunately I can manage a keyboard now as easily as I used to scribble with a pencil.

Why am I telling all this now? I suppose I simply need to explain the situation to my fellow writers and readers. No one else will understand the frustration quite so well. Beyond that, my poetry may alter a little over the coming weeks as I attempt to cope.

I may begin again to prioritize completion over finishing, presence over polishing. I’m not certain. But I have written through severe bouts before, and I mean to go on writing through this one. Hopefully the whole medication issue will be sorted sooner rather than later. (It is actually an insurance issue, not a medical problem.) My condition even with the medication has been far from that of perfect health, which is something I have never had. But the experience of the past few weeks has brought home just how much I had gained and, now, how quickly it can be lost.

Meantime, poetry lives on, and I hope to still record fragments of it as it flies.

All the best to each of you!

---