Time's Mettle and the Art of Adaptation

As the clockmaker's hands wear with grinding gears, so too do human bodies shift with time's quiet demand. This collection of poems does not lament the erosion of youth but honors the quiet brilliance of adaptation. Each verse becomes a cog in a larger mechanism-interlocking moments of resilience, fragility, and reinvention across decades of living.

The Unsteady March of Time

Poets in the realm of disability often frame time as both adversary and ally. Gray hairs surface like winter frost, joints protest with storm-like warnings, and once-effortless tasks become puzzles to solve. Yet through these transformations, verse illuminates the grace of slowing down. Lines stretch and bend, mirroring the rhythm of a cane tapping pavement or fingers learning braille. Time's passage is neither cruel nor kind-it simply is, and poetry becomes the medium through which its complexities are held tenderly.

Adaptive Living: Crafting Life Amidst Constraints

Across these poems, wheels replace worn knees, spectacles magnify fading sight, and voices adapt to the stutter of neurological shifts. The language embraces adaptive devices not as symbols of loss, but as extensions of human ingenuity. One poem describes hands reshaping pottery on a wheel, their tremors lending each bowl a unique curve-a metaphor for the beauty of flaws reborn as strength. Another imagines a dancer using a mobility aid as both crutch and partner, their rhythm unbroken by pause.

Dignity in the Detail

The dignity woven into these poems lies not in grand gestures but in the rituals of daily life. There is courage in the routine: buttoning a shirt with arthritic fingers, rendering a memory into a tactile sculpture for someone with visual impairment, or weaving a story into another language when speech falters. Each act is a testament to the unyielding pulse of creativity, the human spirit's refusal to be erased by limitation.

A Century in Every Line

Decades collapse in these verses. A wheelchair user recalls their mother's hands, now mirrored in their own tremors. A poet with late-stage MS maps constellations on the ceiling as night stretches long. The Clockmaker's Hands becomes a metaphor for the art of survival-each stanza a gear, each breath a tick, each life a chronicle of enduring, evolving beauty.