Senior Lecturer Shanan Ballam has recently published her poem “the dream” with Wordgathering: A Journal of Disability Poetry and Literature. “the dream” is based on an actual dream Shanan had in which she could walk again. Shanan reflects, “I survived a massive stroke in January 2022, and it left me with aphasia—which is a technical term for ‘loss of language.’ I couldn’t speak and the entire right side of my body was paralyzed. I couldn’t talk for three days.”

“My speech therapist in Ogden Regional Intensive Rehab taught me to focus on what was around me and then to describe it, so that’s how this poem was born. All the images in this poem are things and animals that were around me, including the owl, the lilies, the windchimes and the curtain,” Shanan says. “I used all five senses in this poem, starting with ‘the shiny taste of rain,’ and ‘the cold scent of rain on stones,’ examples of synesthesia—mixing the senses. Some of my favorite metaphors and similes in the poem are ‘the moon is a white lily about to bloom,’ and ‘the windchime speaks/in the voice of god/like a waterfall,/fluid,//like the song/of a canyon wren/tumbling down/the canyon . . .’”

You can read “the dream” and listen to Shanan read here.