Poetry and Chronic Pain

“A black-and-white shot of an elderly person's hands playing a Lauberger & Gloss piano” by Lukas Budimaier on Unsplash

Wordsworth once defined poetry as “emotion recollected in tranquility.”

I like the idea of re-collecting feelings once they’ve passed, like gathering spent blossoms. It’s a bit gothic.

A research group in Lancaster, U.K. is soliciting poetry and personal narratives on chronic pain to better understand pain from those who experience it. The poem below was published there last month, and originally published in the print magazine Poet Lore.