I took a photo of a patch of leaves that had fallen from the trees at Longwood Gardens. They may look like discards to some people, but they look like “fallen jewels “to me.
My classmate Mary Lou Meyers is a breast cancer survivor. She is also a wonderful poet whose poems I have been posting, including ones on breast cancer. The most recent was Autumnal Transparency, which I posted on the first day of fall (Sept. 23rd). I love this poem as did many others. Mary Lou wrote to me that…
“Autumnal Transformation” was deemed by the judges at the PA Poetry Society’s biannual meaning to the best descriptive poem of the Autumn Season because it was all inclusive covering all the bases in 24 lines or less. ( I did make one change which was changing “spew” to “gush.” )
Here is the first of several of Mary Lou’s poems that I am posting in recognition of Breast Cancer Awareness Month. I have interspersed them with photos of fall, many of which were taken at Longwood Gardens last week before a heavy rainstorm cut short my visit. Mary Lou’s daughter works there & Mary Lou & I both love the gardens. The mums, roses and other brilliant flowers were all there in their fall splendor!
The Cancer Relief Map
By Mary Lou Meyers
Am I lucky or rejected as a penetrating sadness grips me?
The crescent shaped scar still frozen to the touch,
angry red as though it were rudely interrupted
in its mending by the imprint of radiation rays
as deadly as the cancer. Skirting my underarm
where the surgeon removed lymph nodes,
an abused zipper splayed out along a raised track.
Two scarlet streaks running alongside the paper tape
where clabber leaks out smelling like sour milk.
No incessant sucking sound to ease the pain,
you’ll never feel the keen edge of the razor again,
instead vertigo intercepts the stunted growth,
loss of the equilibrium which served you well under
the clean cool blade of the scalpel.
A cancer relief map nestles within,
distinct numbered bumps emerge and blisters appear,
but there is no sun-baked day of sailing, no holiday,
just the projector gearing up, the burning aftermath,
each beam accounted for, subject to close scrutiny.
A cough barely subsides long enough to catch my breath.
I feel a lightheadedness like a closely mounting precipice,
while the machine runs its collimating intercourse
abrading the skin, humming along on a designated track,
repositioning as the camera takes a new tack,
as if nothing were at stake at all, not even radiation free fall.
Pushing me along the track of radiation zaps,
tangential for 28 days, now a frontal attack,
no need to delay, as long as the skin isn’t breaking down.
St. John’s Wort, my daughter prescribed
keeps the dry roughened skin supple as suede.
“Sounds like a witch’s brew!” The surgeon said.
Where do they draw the wavering line?
Not even that freckle in the middle of my chest
makes them hesitate, a candidate for Hutchinson’s melanoma,
lives up to its blackened edges, spreads eight years later.
We resented the technicians intrusion once,
illusions of being healthy again,
the radiant sun has won over us.
We must pay each day for an extension of our lives,
fear the treatments ending, to be on our own devices.
No longer can we hide, what cancer cells are kept alive?
I am buoyed by my daughter’s herbalist advice, but only
a surgeon’s exam put my breasts and me back together again.
No longer nightmares of breasts rolling down the express,
still I search them like the midnight sky,
wondering if constellations of carcinoma are newly born.
Like ferns unfurling, we learn to laugh, love, and dream through
the toxic beams of our indelible tattoos.
