Featured Person: Sheila Black

Author, poet, editor, activist, lecturer; A woman of many hats, Sheila Black has not only refused to let her childhood XLH diagnosis slow her aspirations down, she has harnessed her experiences to pen soul-stirring and award-winning works.

Poetry by American poets with physical disabilities

Sheila's bibliography spans a whopping 40 books and 4 poetry collections, for which she has won the 2000 Frost-Pellicer Frontera Prize (co-winner) and the honour of the 2012 Witter Bynner Fellowship. Sheila is also a part-time lecturer at the the New Mexico State University and Development Director for the Colonias Development Council.

Fictional prose by Americans with disabilities

Today, we wish to share with you this moving auto-biographical poem that allows us some deeply personal glimpses into her life with XLH. We hope that this poem may bring enrichment to your perspectives and enjoyment to your heart, as it did for us.

What You Mourn

BY SHEILA BLACK

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.