We are not your saviors of the soil,
Nor your greenwashed dreams in prosthetic bloom-
We are the wildflowers on rusted wheels,
Rooted in the ruins you forgot to name.
They taught climate in bullet points,
But never spoke of trembling hands-
How do you compose pain?
How does a spasm survive a flood?
Or, blindness bewilders droughts?
You teach resilience in the tongue of speed,
But we speak in the dialect of slowness-
Our syllabus is scribbled in pauses,
In oxygen tubes and care plans and silence.
Don’t map us out of disaster drills,
Don’t erase us in your rising sea charts.
We, the crips, the chronically holy,
Have always known how to adapt without applause.
What is more ecological
than depending on another’s breath?
What is more sustainable
than a body that learns to live with less?
Crip time is the real time-
It bends like mangroves,
Twists like spine curves under capitalist sun,
and waits for no able-bodied redemption.
We do not climb your eco-mountains,
But we build ladders of listening.
Our activism does not march-
It cradles, it codes, it cares, it crafts,
It converts
stagnant pain into a walking freedom.
We are the students
whose textbooks are morphine schedules,
Whose homework is surviving the day
without disappearing.
But we are still here-
Holding placards in prosthetic fists,
Turning inhalers into microphones,
Planting hope with trembling fingers.
This is not just inclusion-
This is revolution in a bed frame,
A blooming flower sitting on the wheel chair,
In a Zoom box,
In the way we say:
The Earth needs us too.
And, we matter too,
Our lives matter too in the jargon,
In the frameworks of ecology, survival and sustenance.
In poetry, the poets would like to say,
I understand your pain,
The sore numbness,
The uttered silence that echoes,
The outnumbered cries,
Cries for help,
We are the healers who themselves don’t heal but write poetry to heal others,
Remind them they are not alone,
We are too dead.
The dead poets,
The crip likes,
Stuck in the cycle,
Stagnant,
And, decaying,
Perhaps, we are destined to write and decay in our lingering thoughts, memories and reflections.
And, as a poet-
It is solely, my lone journey.
Where I try to read between the lines and map out your erased existence,
You do exist loudly in my poem,
We share the same destiny,
Crippled by the circumstances.
©® Farheen Bhuiyan Nancy
Time Frame: 3.31 pm, Mirpur Cantonment.
Note: As a poet and a sociologist, I feel the closest to nature and the world of Persons with Disabilities. We share the same destiny, crippled by circumstances.
©