Fine Press Poetry

There is a death of sorts in the moments after being diagnosed with cancer. The self you were before is torn and blasted with the suddenness of a dozen mines, the heavy sword of Damocles is roped and hung, your own thin ghost steps forward from the shadows. It feels like being hurled, with scarcely a moment to gather your pack, onto a fast boat-train to the Western Front; your very particular War commencing in a precise, organised military fashion with the long-postings of appointments, and then the day-by-day soldiering of blood tests, injections, surgeries, PICC lines, Central lines, the fierce dull drip-drip-drip of chemotherapy and the bustle and airline-leather chairs and bright nurse-jollity of the oncology suites, and the arching radiotherapy machines like vast dark booming angelic beings, all the time guided by luck, or lack of it, the skill, or lack of it of your medical commanders, and the resources, or lack of them, of your particular department, hospital, trust. And as in the trenches, you have your companions in the mud and the bombardment and rat-infested dug-outs. They are the only ones who can possibly understand, who will ever understand; the only souls who have felt the same mortal loneliness, the same monstrous visceral night-fears, the same unimaginable pain of imagining your children's future grief, of long, long lives lived without you, the same swells of hope and despair and pragmatism. They are the only ones who have suffered the same onslaught of nausea and ulcers and stomach cramps and burning acid and strappado bone pain and the giddy sleepless jittered fairground ride of steroids, the amputations and the raw red puckered scars and the irreversible pin-and-needle nerve damage, and the same urgent need to never, ever talk of it, the same urgent need to talk of nothing else, to be endlessly vigilant, to check, check every twinge and headache and joint pain and cough. But they too have felt the bright glittering patches of levity and unexpected, uncharted beauty of the journey, the sound of lark-song over the cratered fields. For this is the strange serpentine gift of cancer – the dull scales fall away and our brief golden flight through the mead-hall of the world in all its wonderment and horror is revealed. Everything which is unnecessary falls away, and only truth and love and the brief eternal present remain.