What You Mourn
The year they straightened my legs, the young doctor said, meaning to be kind, Now you will walk straight on your wedding day, but what he could not imagine is how even on my wedding day I would arch my back and wonder about the body I had before I was changed, how I would have nested in it. made it my home, how I repeated his words when I wished to stir up my native anger, feel like the exile I believed I was, imprisoned in a foreign body like a person imprisoned in a foreign land, forced to speak a strange tongue, heavy in the mouth, a mouth full of stones. Crippled they called us when I was young, later the word was disabled and then differently abled, but those were all names given by outsiders, none of whom could imagine that the crooked body they spoke of, the body, which made walking difficult and running impossible, except as a kind of dance, a sideways looping like someone about to fall headlong down and hug the earth, that body they tried so hard to fix, straighten was simply mine, and I loved it as you love your own country, the familiar lay of the land, the unkempt trees, the smell of mowed grass, down to the nameless flowers at your feet—clover, asphodel, and the blue flies that buzz over them.
by Sheila Black, retrieved from The Poetry Foundation on July 10, 2026.
Invitation: “I loved it as you love…”
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Sheila Black is an award-winning poet, essayist, and editor whose work has helped shape the conversation around disability in contemporary literature. She is the author of five poetry collections, more than 40 books for children and young adults, and the co-editor of the groundbreaking anthology Beauty Is a Verb: The New Poetry of Disability. She also co-founded Zoeglossia, a nonprofit that creates community and opportunity for poets with disabilities.
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July Courageous Citizen
Dr. Paul Farmer
For our July Americans Who Tell the Truth feature, we chose Dr. Paul Farmer because he spent his life living into the belief that we have a moral responsibility to accompany those who suffer. He didn’t simply talk about equity. He embodied it. Whether someone lived in a remote village or a place forgotten by the rest of the world, he believed no one should be beyond the reach of care.
https://americanswhotellthetruth.org/portraits/dr-paul-farmer/
that body
they tried so hard to fix, straighten was simply mine,
and I loved it as you love your own country ~ Shiela Black.
Outsiders created the language to describe the condition of another's body -- crippled, disabled, differently abled... as the poet claims her body as her own and that she loved it as you love your own country. I see the human rights of self-determination and dignity in Shiela Black's poem.