Well here I am at the end of December and I have not finished writing. It has slowed down a little over the last few days but no booklet for Christmas. But writing is continuing and this has been good. There are now over twenty poems for this new section of the book. They explore different moments over the last nine months and the different emotional responses to those moments. What strikes me about the poems at the moment is how the poems can be divided into two sections. Firstly February to June and then June to the present day. The first section can be characterized by decline, isolation and illness. The second section characterized by incline, a sense of people and community and new health. Writing seemed to have its own mommentum, each poem introduced a new poem, each new poem seems to explore more deeply its subject.

Anyway the experience of writing has been positive. These poems are written quickly - then I move on to the next one.

I'll finish this blog with an example.

Amputation

One Monday, early June,
the surgeons finally cut me adrift,
freed me from
the iron like anchor of my legs
that bound me to the earth.

Amputation was the whisper that,
over the weeks,
gathered its own authority
and settled over everything.
Amputation was the obscene
healing they offered.

Afterwards part of me rose into the air
soaring over the heads
of family and doctors,
untouchable and unable to hear
their bad news
falling like grey ashes below me.

And part of me lay,
on the bed,
snapped off at the legs.
My hands and eyes
searching a strange, new,
disfigured wholeness.



© David Loffman

Hello. I meant to write something in November during my weekends home from the rehabilitation centre I am in to help mke walk again. However weekends were very precious times, and I wanted to spend as much as I could with my family.

So now I am home. I am walking again, rather slowly but I hope it will get easier and faster.

My other obsession over the months has been writing. It has been non stop.

In 1998 I collected together all the poems I had written about the experience of being ill with a serious illness. It was in two parts. The first included all the poems from when the disease started in 1976 until 1998. I wrote part two as a reflection on the illness that I had thought had burned itself out. I printed these out as a Christmas booklet, dedicated to my consultant who was about to retire. The booklet was called Touching The Dark.

However since August I have been writing very intensely about the violent flare up of the disease which began in january 2004. It forms a third part and I hope to be printing a these poems in a small collection for this Christmas.

However I am still in the middle of writing poems and time is running out.

You can read a few of these poems on www.loffman.co.uk

Take care

David