The world is black and white, but oh, sometimes it's gray.
How is it that we know everything about the tangible world,
Yet too often nothing about why another person does what they do...?
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Below is a poem by Andrea Gibson about her cancer and what is real or not.
I garden in the soil of a song.
Walk barefoot through rows
of sheet music, picking strawberries
from the low notes, peaches
from the high notes. I feed myself
a chorus, and for the first time
in many months, I am full.
But that’s not real, my mind demands,
trusting the seedless machine.
My mind repeats the newscaster’s
teleprompted panic. Repeats
the doctor’s doomsday speech.
There’s no time to not be real, it begs.
I point to my left lung–a satchel full
of tumors. Point to a pantry full of pills
that haven’t helped, a bed I have
have hardly left for weeks.
Is this what you mean by real? I ask.
Yes! my mind screams, frantic
in its mission to make matter
all that matters.
But how
is that more real, I say,
than the first time I was breathless
from holding a stethoscope to my pain
and hearing the heartbeat of the whole world?
My mind argues like a seasoned lawyer,
all objection and rebuttals.
But I, an artist, stretch my heart out
into canvas, hand one brush
to joy and another brush to grief,
grinning as I watch them paint
the exact same rolling meadow
the same hue of emerald green.
That isn’t real, my mind insists
as I take off running through
the pasture, stopping only to do
a cartwheel beside a lonely windmill
who has always wanted a friend.
I fly up the solemn staircase
of a billionaire’s lifeless mansion
to replace the diamonds with raindrops
I found huddled on a leaf of a Birch
tree beside my home when
I was nine and a half years old.
It’s not real that you still have those!
my mind protests, as if everything
that ever was isn’t forever here.
As if I’m not still a giggling child
hiding in the place I know my mom will
look first, because I want to be found.
During my CT scan last week
I couldn’t find myself inside of myself
because my mind was louder than I was.
But then I gave up all control, unfurled
like the petals of a pen blooming
poems on the sterile walls,
for the next worried patient to water.
But that’s not real, my mind contends.
Real is provable. Googleable.
Then google this, I say, —
The chemo that kept me alive,
the chemo cold men in white coats
take credit for, is sourced from the bark
of the Pacific Yew tree and was first
discovered for its healing properties
by Two-Spirit Indigenous people
in the Pacific Northwest, who were guided
by the voices of moss and the mist.
Is that real? my mind asks.
I don’t see the point in answering
because my mind can’t hear the language
spoken by the moss, has never
picked the sweetest fruit from the saddest note
of a song and planted every seed
to feed the joy of those to come.
What’s the worst thing that ever happened
to you? my mind asked me long ago.
I said, Not believing in what I couldn’t yet see.
What’s the best thing that ever happened
to you? my mind asked me long ago.
I said, Learning that you are not me.
