10:08pm September 28, 2014

Sometimes, Restrictions Only Increase Life’s Richness

I spent six years in bed, six years I found
The richness of the love surrounding me
A tree outside my window so profound
From detail comes familiarity
They say that all restriction is a curse
A nightmare from which folks can never wake
But we exalt our highest forms of verse
Like sonnets, which restrict which form to take
And always those who could, would hurry past
Without a glance at me, or at the tree
The richness that they missed, they moved too fast
To see what I and other slow folks see
For life is rich to infinite degree
It’s found in sonnets, and in folks like me

[As usual, this can be found on my main poetry blog. More discussion of this poem below the cut.]

I’ve always wanted to do a sonnet comparing the constraints on a sonnet and the constraints on a disabled person’s body, but I never got around to it until now. Because one we view as beautiful and created by hard work and beautiful because of its constraints, and the other we view as horrible and ugly because it is constrained, or because we believe it is constrained.

I’ve also wanted to explain to people the way that when you’re in one place for so long, you begin to soak in all this information about the place that you would miss if you were running around all over the place. So those people who pitied me for not being able to see more than one view every day, didn’t understand my life at all. There was a tree outside my window and otherwise a view outside my window, that other people would see as unchanging, but I saw every tiny bit of what changed, inside my apartment and outside of it. I saw so much beauty and so much detail because I was restricted to seeing this one place and knowing it as well as I possibly could. And like the restrictions in a sonnet, the restrictions in my life produced as much beauty as they did frustration. (And anyone who has ever tried to write a sonnet knows about frustration.)