Shipwrecked

Click for the Poetry Tuesday - Tuesday 5/13 Link List.

This year, Diabetes Blog Week and TuDiabetes are teaming up to bring out the poet in you! Write a poem, rhyme, ballad, haiku, or any other form of poetry about diabetes. After you’ve posted it on your blog, share it on the No Sugar Added® Poetry page on TuDiabetes, and read what others have shared there as well!

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Shipwrecked

Treading water, pumping
my arms and legs,
barely keeping afloat,
for years.
The waves of my life cresting,
cascading.

I could handle it.
Or at least...
I didn’t want you to have to.
I found my footing, now and then.

When there was only
one set of footprints in the sand,
they were mine,
and they slogged forward
against a relentless undertow.

Diabetes was my burden to bear,
not yours, dear reader.

Like the wild-eyed ruler of an unmarked coastline,
I talked to myself and no one,
if I talked of it at all.

But the day that
those million bottles
with stories like mine
floated within my reach,
I realized I didn't have to chart my course alone.

Like a recovered castaway,
I could tell you now of number-filled unnumbered days,
etching tick marks onto logbook walls.
I could tell you still of darker fears
that prick my days
and lance my dreams.

An advocate is poised
to recount both the despair
- and the hope -
of the human condition.
Sometimes it comes from sun-blanched lips
whipped hard by salty air,
soul of scar tissue, leathered, bloodied.
Sometimes it’s said from the easy chair of privilege
with modern comforts
that seem bionic and apart.

That empty stretch of sand
will always be my beach, my exile, my home.
We find our way
back to this scene.
The concrete is not my truth.

But if you read this message,
That means we're neither of us alone.