The Poem That Got Me Through Chemo
I read it every day for six months. It wasn't about cancer.
During chemo I could not read. The books were too long, the sentences too heavy, the effort of following a story too much for the fog the drugs left me in. But I could read a poem. A poem was short enough to hold in the fog.
I had one poem that I read every day, and it was not about cancer. It was not about illness or survival or fighting or any of the things people write about when they are sick. It was about a tree in a garden, a specific tree, a specific garden, and the way the light came through the leaves in the late afternoon.
I don't know why that poem worked. It was not a poem about hope or strength or any of the things a sick person is supposed to need. It was a poem about a tree, and the tree was the thing that was still standing, still green, still doing the thing trees do, while I was not.
I read it every day for six months. I read it in the chair during the drip, I read it in the bed during the nausea, I read it in the car on the way home. The poem was the thing I could hold when nothing else could be held.
When I was better I wrote to the poet. I told her the poem had got me through chemo, and she wrote back and said she had written it about her grandmother's garden, the one she had sold when her grandmother died. The poem was about grief, not cancer, and I had read it as a poem about a tree. We had both been right.
I still read it. Not every day now, but often enough. The poem is not about cancer. It is about a tree that is still standing, and a garden that is still green, and a light that still comes through the leaves in the late afternoon. That is the thing a poem does when it is doing its job. It gives you a tree to hold.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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