Said and Done (A History of Telling)
By Grace Marsh
There is nothing more to be said
on the topic of my blindness.
I said it all when I was fourteen,
newly illiterate and memorising
verses in my bedroom. I said it all
when I was fifteen and kissing
my first girlfriend while visiting
a school for the visually impaired.
I said it all when I was sixteen
and posing for photos I'll never see
with my dying grandma.
They say there was love in her eyes.
I said it all when I tried to kill
myself at seventeen, and at eighteen,
when I received a tactile Christmas card
from Wakefield Prison. I said it all
when I fell into a wheelchair
at nineteen. My hand feels lighter
when not bearing the weight of a cane —
for me, heavy has always been a lovely word.
I said it all at twenty, when I was too sick
to remember why seeing mattered at all,
and at twenty-one, when the last
of my visual memory slipped
through my fingers —
I didn't bother trying to catch
it. I was happy to watch it leave.
I said it all at twenty two, when I hung
art on the walls of my bedroom
for the first time, and at twenty three,
when I stopped posting content about
sight loss on social media.
I said it all at twenty four,
when my best friend died
and the fact I'd never seen
her didn't matter at all
and the reservoir of my poetry dried up
and I couldn't write for months
and someone asked me to give them
a stanza about blindness
and I wanted to hurt them
in some deep, fundamental way
and I felt guilty for wanting to hurt them
in some deep, fundamental way
and I tried to tell them that I was hurting
in some deep, fundamental way
which had fuck all
to do with my charred optic nerves.
There really is nothing more to be said
on the topic of my blindness.
I have said it all again and again and again
for ten years now
I have borne the burden,
not of sightlessness
but of the things other people
expect me to do with it.
There is nothing more to be said
on the topic of my blindness,
only this.
By Grace Marsh
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