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A poem on mortality & the heart

I’ve been thinking about my heart condition and looking at poems I wrote shortly after having a heart attack. Contemplating my mortality is a new thing for me. I’ve had to adjust my thinking about time and the future. It’s a subtle shift but a profound one to consider that my time to be, to write, and to love is limited. It’s unsettling in the most interesting way to think of the body as having a mind and deadlines of its own.

Of Meter & Disorder

Even lying still, the body swings
to its own beat, sings a song
like scattered rose petals on the bedside table,
those
fragrant hieroglyphics
telling a tale as old as time, of time.

Whether we embrace a rigid form
or live inside a blurry disarray,
shape and rhythm rocks the blood,
owns
the sea and our own organs.
The inner being has a clock face.
Bilateral symmetry defines health
and beauty. Meter’s always underneath,
a solid frame that makes
a song a song, and yet
each digression more sharply sweet.

Rachel Dacus
2023


Four poetry collections by Rachel Dacus on Amazon:
Arabesque, Gods of Water and Air, Femme au Chapeau, Earth Lessons.

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2 thoughts on “A poem on mortality & the heart”

  1. This is interesting, Rachel, thank you. It made me consider if a heart attack I had 10 years ago changed the way I wrote – it’s probable. I don’t think it’s the increased sense of mortality, necessarily, but the experience of your body (and brain) being different in some way to how it was before it happened and,, more obviously, your needs/expectations within the restrictions that are suddenly imposed. (A slight tangent – In the 24/48 hours or so after surgery, I tried to write down the hallucinations and thoughts that occurred under morphine, which became a poem that seemed freer, less constrained than anything I’d done before. )

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