12 Poems That Break the Silence on Disability and Illness

November 14^th through December 2oth marks Disability History Month in the UK, where I’m writing from. As a chronically ill writer myself, I thought this would make a fine opportunity to share and celebrate poems that centre disability and illness in their themes.

These poems are earnest, brutal, and sometimes hard to read. But they’re incredibly important, communicating experiences that are often talked-over and ignored. If you’re disabled or chronically ill yourself, you may resonate with what they have to say. (Or you may not—everyone experiences illness differently.) If you aren’t, I hope that these grant you insight into our lives. Frequently, it isn’t pity we are looking for: it’s empathy, and the right to take up space.

“I’m rewatching the She-Ra episode where Glimmer gets sick for the first time” by Arianna Monet

I haven’t watched She-Ra (yet), but the experience at the crux of this poem is one I can relate to intimately, as a young person whose health unexpectedly started to decline. There’s a kicking-and-screaming sort of defiance to the narrator’s words, a refusal to be happy about the situation, which simultaneously makes me feel heard and optimistic about carrying on.

“It’s going to hurt” by Sandra Simons

A more melancholy poem than the first, Simons’ verse follows its narrator in second-person through an unspecified and vaguely-alluded-to illness. Despair approaches, and is held at arm’s length with dark and speculative imagery.

“ANAMNESIS” by Leslie McIntosh

There’s a certain sense of reification—unfamiliarity with and estrangement from one’s own body, despite being unable to escape it—that McIntosh evokes beautifully in this poem. Anamnesis—the process of recollection—becomes an experience on a cellular level for the poem’s narrator.

“The Moon and the Yew Tree” by Tory Dent

Written in dialogue with the poem of the same name by Sylvia Plath—utilising excerpts and replying to them—Dent’s poem narrates in haunting verse the anxiety of a fatal illness. Diagnosed with HIV at 30, Dent knew this experience intimately and wrote of it extensively. Her second poetry collection, HIV, Mon Amour, pays it particular focus.

“Self-Portrait as Self-Care Mantra” by Elizabeth Theriot

We’re often told to take care of ourselves when we’re sick. But when you’re always sick, the tenets of self-care grow blurry and complex, identity-forming and identity-robbing. Theriot—who has an Ehlers-Danlos syndrome—explores the nuance of these feelings in this poem. In her essay “Common Surfaces,” published in the Crab Orchard Review, she says, “I want to keep up. I want to indulge in the full experiences of my life without injury or embarrassment. I don’t want to miss out, though I feel that I often have—that a sort of gilded normalcy exists right beyond the reach of my fingertips.” This is a sentiment I—and I’m sure many others with chronic health conditions—can relate to.

“The Man with Night Sweats” by Thom Gunn

In simple, spare verse, Gunn evokes a uniquely isolating experience that comes with being ill: waking up alone and in pain. The title places distance between the narrator and his identity—“The Man with Night Sweats” sounds as though it refers to someone else—but that distance shrinks with every line.

“Emerald Spider Between Rose Thorns” by Dean Young

In contrast with “The Man with Night Sweats,” “Emerald Spider with Rose Thorns” is baroque and maximalist in its use of language. Published in 2013, two years after its author received a heart transplant, there’s an air of disbelief and celebration in each word. But at the same time, a sharpened sense of vulnerability.

“bad road” by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha

There’s a particular anguish that comes when a loved one wants to help you with your chronic pain, only to realise that they can’t make it magically go away. Unlike an acute injury, there’s no remedy that will cause the symptoms to vanish; only methods of mediation and compromise that make getting through the day a little easier. On the loved one’s end, there can be denial. A desire to research, to say “well, maybe if you tried this…?”—because it’s hard to accept that sometimes things are just the way they are. And on the chronic person’s end, there’s almost a feeling of guilt: of failure, because these things haven’t worked and now their loved ones feel bad. It’s a complex situation, and Piepzna-Samarasinha captures that complexity beautifully.

“Monster” by Jason Irwin

This striking poem makes use of Gothic imagery to explore the fear that comes with being seriously ill. The titular monster is a shifting thing, appearing wherever the narrator looks as the locus of his anxieties.

“blood·sugar·canto” by ire’ne lara silva

Diabetes—according to these 2021 stats from the CDC—affects an estimated 11.6% of the U.S. population. Despite that, it’s a topic rarely explored in poetry. In bleak yet defiant verse, silva discusses the harsh financial realities that come with chronic illness—finding a hopeful note to end on.

“Earth, You Have Returned to Me” by Elaine Equi

Sometimes, there is a light at the end of the tunnel. A new medication proves effective after years of fruitless trial and error; symptoms go into remission; an accessibility measure is granted that immediately improves your quality of life. “Earth, You Have Returned to Me” captures that feeling in exquisite fashion.

“A Body’s Universe of Big Bangs” by Leslie Contreras Schwartz

Examining the body on a cellular level, Contreras Schwartz meditates on the million complexities that allow us to exist, however imperfectly, as humans in the world. This poem is a reminder that the body is a miraculous thing.