May Day

While going to see a spine specialist isn't exactly my idea of a happy way to spend Beltane, I think it will be good in the long run to have gone. It wasn't nearly as dreadful as I feared it would be. The doctor did the same sort of evaluation as the physical therapist (testing reflexes, asking me about what hurts and where and when, checking out range of motion, that sort of thing) and tentatively came to the same conclusion: some sort of pressure on or inflammation of a nerve in my hip joint.

She said I should continue the PT exercises, ordered an MRI to see if we can figure out more specifics, and gave me a referral to an acupuncturist. I'm a little skeptical about the latter, but she said she's seen good results from acupuncture for folks with similar issues to mine, and at this point I'm willing to give it a try.

When I was going through my poetry notebooks for the recent Etsyblogger carnival on the topic of poetry, I ran across an old, old poem that I put aside to share today. I wrote it a long time ago, when I was in a big sonnet stage and realized that the "Ring Around the Rosy" nursery rhyme had fourteen words. It's an "acrostic sonnet," though in my case it's the full word beginning each line and not the letter which makes the acrostic element. (Acrostic being the quality of using the beginning of the line to spell out something vertically.) Between my game leg and the obvious May 1st reference, it seemed appropriate:


May Day

Ring me round with laughing children, dancing
around and around in the pale daffodils,
the yellow, nodding flowers chancing spring.
Rosy sky wipes wet hands down her skirts, spills
pockets brimming with sultry, heavy air.
Full puddles standing in the glossy street
of gravel-gilded pavement call for bare
posies of children's toes -- pink, tiny, sweet.

Ashes of memory, now -- bitter, gray.
Ashes only, no longer the burning.
We slog through this muddy field on May Day,
all alone, sodden socks blistering. Yearning.

Fall just once to your naked knees. Stumble
down and stop. Now rise, kindled and humble.