Hilary Sheers
Painter with Parkinson’s Disease
Imagine
your brush will not take the path you wish
It slips and trembles with the jerk
Of an erratic, unfair nervous twitch
Preventing any detailed work
Later
As the tremor worsens with the course
Of time, limbs grow stiff, fingers cannot grip
Your tools of trade, your life force
Dammed inside can only slip
Downwards
Years yawn before you, mind's eye
A fleeting glimpse of canvases
That now will never be, not live to die
Like this, locked in frozen crevasses
Rigid
Cemented by lack of dopamine
To a blank sheet, dry brush
Unblunted pencils, drawings only seen
By the palsied painter's florrid rush
Coloured
By this prison no doctor can unlock
This vivid scene, this painting never done
Sentenced to life, all expression docked.
Why am I, a writer, still the one
With words?
Page(s) 64
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