Heartbreaking poem about Parkinson’s
If you or someone you know has been affected by Parkinson’s disease, you’ll know all too well how debilitating an illness it can be. In this heart-wrenching poem, one woman shares her struggle as her mother is slowly lost to the disease.
Beauty Tips
What words to fill the day? How to resist sentiment,
balancing dream and the recklessly blue sky?
Spring arrives with its allegro swell of trees, pollen,
a novel open on the kitchen bench, breakfast aromas.
Outside, the garden languors in laundry, agapanthus,
our swimming pool in need of chlorine turns emerald green
with insect wings, serrated jacaranda. What colour is truth?
I dip the soft sable in powder to dust away speckles,
cover shadows on my face, and yesterday’s mascara.
Cleanse, tone, exfoliate. At all times, brush downwards.
I’ve disregarded my mother’s beauty tips, her lessons
in permanence or grace. Her body slow, involuntary;
her eyes widened by Parkinson’s, a fine tremor in the jaw
while the heart arranges, steady with belief and forgetting.
I take comfort in this. Mother, show me the other way back.
How the gravel is imprinted by the wind, by human steps.
Walk with me this evening, the sky crepuscular, rose-tinted,
the drifting scent of wild freesias like something strange,
half-known. You shuffle, sight weakened, wanting
to observe the fallen shingles, twigs, and the scarcity of birds.
What’s your favourite poem? Let us know in the comments below.
Written by Michelle Cahill.
This is an extract from Falling And Flying: Poems On Ageing, Edited by Judith Beveridge and Dr Susan Ogle, Brandl & Schlesinger.
All proceeds from book sales will go directly to the Penney Ageing Research Unit at the Royal North Shore Hospital. For Book sales, please email sogle@med.usyd.edu.au. For Donations, please click here.
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