Healing Poetry | Writing and Healing

Four Chambers for Tyler David Tandeski: A Featured Piece

Posted by Diane Morrow on November 27, 2006 in Featured Pieces, Healing Poetry

[I am very pleased to introduce this poem submitted by Danielle Crawford, a young woman at Fairhaven College in western Washington state. She began writing this poem while in her first “official” poetry class, four months ago, and she is now, she tells me, passionately pursuing a double major in creative writing and fine art.] Four Chambers for Tyler David Tandeski In memoriam [October 1, 1999] I. It stinks like cotton swabs turned cold beside Mother’s under-ripe belly. Six months have passed. She sits, waits: hunched, hurt on that inhospitable bed. I can’t tell her this, but she’s aged a decade in a day. Never looked so frail: a daisy, withered by the worst of winters. The October sky— Mom’s crying again, laying above peppered linoleum, under so many lights there’s nowhere left to hide. She’s naked, barren beneath the gown. I try to resist, but join her, weep. * The doctor’s eyes are dull with mock concern. I, twelve, confused, want to escape. In their crisply clean uniforms— uniform sterility— they stare, then speak: The human heart has four chambers… How were we to know God gave you only two? * Years of wait and worry plagued my parents. Mom’s stiff as the starchy parchment paper she’s now lying on. Emotions repressed, her words are strangled: It’s done. II. Did we make the right choice? After the initial miracle of you, I guess we believed in invincibility. An age-old wish, the desire to rewind. Would it have been selfish—? We thought of the steps you never took. We kissed the ground you never set foot upon. Since you’ve been gone, we’ve lost our footing, our solid ground. I try to picture what you’d be like now. I’ve dressed your name up in costumes, cloaked your memory with denial, anguish, rage… anything I could muster, paralyzed. I don’t wish to remember you this way. I’m back where I began: without a clue. The cotton, the clothing, that cold room, my memory, too— it’s all too white. I can’t help but wonder if, taken, you took color from our lives. ‘99. Now seven more. You would be eight, Tyler, had you survived half a heart and Down Syndrome. I’m greedy; I want you next to me. You still are my brother. I think of you, whose footprint—only an inch!— left a lasting imprint. The human heart has four chambers… Your heart was stronger than mine for letting you go. We need your malformed heart to mend our...

The Shelter of Poetry

Posted by Diane Morrow on August 22, 2006 in Healing Places, Healing Poetry

Several years ago now, in the May/June 2001 issue of Poets and Writers magazine, a series of articles appeared on the topic, “Writing as a Healing Art.” Among these, perhaps the most compelling was a feature by Felicia Mitchell on Frances Driscoll, the author of a volume of poetry, The Rape Poems. Driscoll was working as a poet, beginning to publish her work, when in 1987 she was raped. She stopped writing after the rape. She believed, she said, that she would never write again. And then, gradually, poems began to come. One such poem is entitled, “Island of the Raped Women.” It contains these lines: We all sleep through the night. We wake eager from dreams filled with blue things and designs for hats. At breakfast, we make a song, chanting our litany of so much collected blue. We do not talk of going back to the world. We talk of something else. . . (Read the whole poem here.) In the article in Poets and Writers, Driscoll speaks about the responses she gets to this particular poem: Little girls barely out of their teens ask. Sometimes college women ask. The question is always whispered. The question is desperate and urgent. The question always breaks my heart. The question is, ‘Where is the island? Where is the island? It’s such a moving question, such a poignant question. It also points to what is possible: words powerful enough to create an island. Words powerful enough to create shelter. For the reader? For the writer? For...