Stunning Poetry By Veronica Ashenhurst, Canadian lawyer with severe ME.

[Countrygirl]

Veronica Ashenhurst is a member of the Law Society of Ontario, in Canada, and has published articles on legal education in the Dalhousie Law Journal, the Ottawa Law Review, and the Canadian Legal Education Annual Review. Her poetry is forthcoming in Breath & Shadow. She lives with severe Myalgic Encephalomyelitis/Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (ME/CFS).​

Hippocrates' Staff​

"But I shall let the little I have learnt go forth into the day in order that someone better than I may guess the truth, and in his work may prove and rebuke my error. At this, I shall rejoice that I was yet a means whereby this truth has come to light."
—Albrecht Dürer, c. 1513*


Tarnished idol, whom I sought to revere:
awed by your steady surgeon's knife,
the blood and breath that you bequeathed me.
Yet still I chafe under your checkered past.


Once, you avowed women's wombs moved about
or might fall out, if we ran wild. We were
smaller, shriller men, you held, but procreant,
and too much like the milk-filled moon.


You favoured male cell lines, male mice;
blithely sent us home with stopping hearts,
and peeling myelin sheaths. We were, you claimed,
just hurt by careless love or mired in sulk.


So certain were you that this hamstrung life—
dreams shipwrecked, stripped of rigging, in my depths—
was trifling, girlish neurasthenia:
Paxil and pure thoughts could will me back.


Medicine, will you reprove your faults?
I might still honour you if I trusted
your variegated history was yet a means
whereby the truth could finally come to light.

Patient


I felt muzzled in those flat, troubled years,
A desert tortoise who knew secret burrow,
Quiet’s heft, modest earth: I learnt the view from bed.
The words they said lent me tough carapace,
Face withdrawn, ready for the smallest slight.
And in the wounded places, diffidence.
One day, the tortoise tunnelled so fardown,
A lioness emerged from my inmost depths,
Her muscles staunch, her coat a woollen jewel.
The creature’s eyes sparked gold, she inhaled
The world, then bellowed out. The sound was red
Missile, an echoing primordial roar.
We had been missing from our lives so long,
No one had thought to notice us before


"Leo’s Bite"

Enduring illness made me forget you,
as one might forget magenta.
Then I recalled your shoulder
undulating under sun
that seldom warms
my joints and indoor skin.

Storm huntress of blue
wildebeest and zebra, serene as baobab,
you held a dappled lion cub in your jaw.
I—childless—envied your wild motherhood:
the cub’s mouth searching
for your dark teat, and warmth.

Patience and planets whirl
inside your gilt fur cage;
inside your gallop, a grassland sea.
I—struggling with a flight of stairs—
coveted your dance, the pride of sisters,
whiskered understanding.

Wildcat, I begrudged you,
until I remembered that you—
remote, but with a pulse like mine—
could help me bear my ruined body,
as you endure wind,
hunt, birth, and open sky.

Let me wrench a piece of joy
from this life of teacups and disease,
the way you wrench
wherewithal from the entrails,
nutrient-rich, of your spent
and bowing prey.


"Roar"
I am urged to carve an identity
from illness, despondency, wheelchair;
this identity will seemingly bring me
friendship on social media, until I delete it.

I am supposed to knit hats for homeless people,
live on the state’s monthly thousand dollars,
and watch my mother—aged, anxious wren,
spine bent—trying to care for me.

As I wait for attention to a neglected disease,
I am exhorted to tune my ire, a violin;
rallied to mistrust the lure to rend my body,
and face instead, with poise, a quarter-life in bed.

Yet I am not what I am supposed to be,
tired of counting breaths—I still have a roar.
If I could burn the decades I have lost,
I’d shout into the ocean’s salted surf.

I long to paint on wall-sized canvas,
travel, sunburnt, by myself,
kiss a man at dusk in Athens or Madrid,
and fill notebooks with the flush of life.

I yearn to eat a lion’s heart,
taste its blood and courage,
and adopt that blood and valor,
like a brother, for my own.

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[Countrygirl]

Bulwark: To Jane Eyre

My walls, brick and plaster, stand pitiless.
So, I covet the far horizon, as did
Rochester’s wife, groaning in her windowless
Third-story room. But my infirm hips
And legs can’t take me anywhere, only
Muddling across the still hall, far from
That turquoise line of beckoning, where sky
And earth embrace. I’m scared the arctic tern
Caged in my ribs will break its wings over
A view it cannot see, while walls close in.
Still, here’s Jane Eyre, hardback. Heroine,
I search your thoughts and fire and self-respect.
I’ll read until the ceiling floats; we will
Mutiny against fate today, and soar.

###

Frontier

Yearning had become a foreign tongue
Recalled in crumbs. Want, at dawn, of another’s
Warmth, pulse, while I turned over, playing dead.
The light bent, then, clandestine. Air spoke
Through the window screen, brushed my ankles,
Caressed my scar— “Who are you?” asked the wind.
“I am breath, like you,” I said, in the blank,
Sunlit space between pallor and flush,
Sickness and forgetting, where the coiled
Helix of a bloom could finally unfurl.
Breeze that never saw my cane, its azure
Voice lingering, then away to places
I will one day go in dreams—to the
Elephant-skinned oak, to stars like open hands.

###

Dreams and the Hyena

–for S.M., in friendship

In youth, you and I were long-legged antelope:
Soaring springbok, eyes starred with prospect,
While bronze butterflies shone among our herd.
Sure that we belonged, we stotted—backs arched,
Nimble, and danced two meters through the air.
We ate flowers, grew dreams. The world was ours.
Then hyena singled us from the herd.
We ran, were mauled by those bone-cracking
Teeth, and swift illness dragged us from our peers—
Thinking we had died; you and I, newly cold.
Yet we live, but apart from others, clawed,
Limbs stiff, disjointed bearing. So, when you
Celebrate a milestone, I think of how
Fragments, once whole, once winged, still gleam.

 

[Countrygirl]

Second Spring​

Come for tea, though I’m plaintive. You’ll wear scented
May blooms. I’ll tell you about my first spring.
I had unfurled plans, then, angled to the sun:
codes of law I’d learn; a dais at which I’d stand;
a nameplate; an office. But the court robes are
scarcely worn, my poise stands moth-eaten now.
Illness settled like a loft of pigeons
on my limbs. The world greyed to this room, this
exhale, these dejected hips now turning
by degrees. Sit by me, in your lilac of renewal:
I’ll pull your four-petaled buds that taste of
green rain. You won’t see summer, you’ll fall in weeks,
but you re-emerge yearly, while I thirst,
decades on, to grow jeweled leaves—to flower again.

Sestina for My Mother​

You lugged hope to teashops: your keen-eyed girl,
the child you believed could conquer blue worlds
with her wit. You showed her Klimt and tested
her recall for French while she sat, a friend
in small-scale, helping you forget a distressed
flight, by sea, from the old country. You confessed
the burden of swift uprooting, confessed
to narrow rooms, pickling jars for cups. The girl
listened through silk braids, sensing distress.
By after-school light, books became the girl’s world,
as books had been your world, well-thumbed print friends
on the shelf, refuge when fate sent its tests.
The girl fell ill from infection, testing
the will you had left. Damp, scared, she confessed
her strength had turned like a changeable friend.
So, you took her to doctors, who told the girl
they had run various tests, and your world
halted. The girl might have mental distress,
claimed the doctors, might be tired, distressed,
wanting reprieve from her studies, and the test
results—negative—only showed her world-weary.
This was no contrived pang, the girl confessed.
You believed her, sunk in her wheelchair, your girl
whose verve had once lit teashops. You’d be a friend,
then, as stalwart as red cedar. A friend,
a mother with roots. Still, your daughter’s distress
grew when doctors said they had nothing for girls
with an illness few cared to thoroughly test.
It was simpler to shrug behind desks, they confessed,
to leave girls forgotten in beds, for the world
spun on. The girl became a woman. Her world
held blank hours, sore limbs, seclusion. Old friends
fell away; your grief felt hard to confess,
while doctors, half-hearted, reviewed the distress.
In the girl’s blood and cells, they ran new tests:
her body was ill after all. The girl
had nearly forsaken the world. Your distress
hid in your friendly heart. But these cumbrous tests
had rendered you mother—thus you confessed to the girl.

Veronica Ashenhurst’s poems have appeared in The Christian Century, Health Affairs, Star 82 Review, and Wordgathering, among other journals. Her poetry has been nominated for the Best of the Net (2022).

 

[lenora]

What a shame that this talented young woman became a lawyer and can't really practice. Although this has happened to many of us, and it always strikes a chord of sadness in me. Not now, I'm older, but I do remember the sense of loss of those younger years and all of the people wondering about their futures.

I had never heard of Veronica Ashworth and I do like and understand many of her poems. Some have left me at the back of the class, but that's just fine.

Good for her. You can tell that she's a writer, so I expect that we'll here more of her as the years pass. Yours, Lenora