Slice of Life #15/Poetry Friday: Losing time to a migraine

Poetry Friday is hosted by  Jone, at Check it Out

The March Slice of Life Challenge is hosted by Stacey and Ruth at Two Writing Teachers

 

My  mother-in-law was a special woman, strong and brave and hard working.  At a time when women were not encouraged to pursue careers and lives of their own, she put herself through college and went on to be a teacher.  She was taken too soon, just as she was beginning to enjoy a well-earned retirement for which she had many wonderful plans.  Among the things we had in common are our professions....and migraines.   I remember her stories of having to teach with a full-on migraine,  of having to make it through the day somehow until she could get home and collapse.  Prone to migraines myself, I could not imagine how she did it - especially since she taught third grade! 

When I went back to work, as a teacher myself, I came to appreciate her even more.  Yesterday was a migraine day - I knew it the moment I woke up.  It built with each moment of the day...crescendoing during my eight period class, when I felt one side of the room lift and tilt back and forth.  Luckily, it was my last teaching period of the day.  I crept home and went straight to bed.   The vise had loosened today, and I am tiptoeing back to normal, slowly starting to feel the shadow lift. Since it's Poetry Friday Day and Slice of Life March Challenge #14 Day, I thought I'd share this poem which captures so well a little bit of what the last two days have been like:

 

Dear Migraine, by Gail Mazur You're the shadow lurking in me and the lunatic light waiting in that shadow.   Ghostwriter of my half-life, intention's ambush I can't prepare for, ruthless whammy   you have me ogling a blinding sun, my right eye naked even with both lids closed—   glowering sun, unerring navigator around this darkened room, you're my laser probe,   I'm your unwilling wavelength, I can never transcend your modus operandi,   I've given up trying to outsmart you, and the new thinking says I didn't invent you—   whatever you were to me I've outgrown, I don't need you, but you're tenacity embodied,   tightening my skull, my temple, like plastic wrap. Many times, I've traveled to a dry climate   that wouldn't pander to you, as if the great map of America's deserts held the key to a pain-free future,   but you were an encroaching line in the sand, then you were the sand.  We've spent the best years   of my life intertwined: wherever I land you entrap me in the unraveled faces   of panhandlers, their features my features— you, little death I won't stop for, little death   luring me across your footbridge to the other side, oblivion's anodyne. Soon—I can't know where or when—   we'll dance ache to ache again on my life's fragments, one part abandoned, the other abundance—   For a time, it was believed that Van Gogh suffered from migraines, too, which resulted in the halo-ey effects he so beautifully painted - such as in his "Starry Nights"  - a pretty accurate rendering, if I may say so!