After watching the movie
where you could not walk,
could not talk,
lay still within your iron lung,
able to blink only one eyelid,
with which you communicated
your thoughts to the world,
what a miracle it seemed,
getting up, dazed, in the dark theatre,
taking step after step up the aisle,
out into the falling dusk,
seeing and hearing the aliveness of the city,
legs, arms, breath, eyes, ears,
all working.
You turned my simple footsteps
into a miracle.
Poetry Jam's prompt today is Steps, which made me remember reading, and then seeing the movie, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, about France's Jean-Dominique Bauby. After his stroke at age 42, Bauby dictated his incredible memoir by blinking his left eyelid, his only working muscle, for each letter of the alphabet, to an assistant, to spell out his thoughts. He died soon after his book was published.
It definitely put complaining about obstacles to writing in perspective for me.
