“Damn the Ears”
By Susan Jane Sturgis
Credit: @wanderingcrow/Unsplash
Birth they came
Imperfect
Damn the Ears
Childhood blissfully woven throughout my days
Nights of silence
Partial silence
Hours in thought and talk
My dog listened and understood
Time in hours on the old back porch
I was in my own safe, social world.
School seemed no challenge,
Despite the loss
Work was medium to easy,
Except math word problems,
Ears could no longer compensate
Then society began to eat around the edges
Of my life
Offset in lower school with one hearing aid.
Greater demands came
Felt shunned
Was it me or the ears?
Higher education proved the most horrendous
Ate aggressively around the edge of my life,
Shattered a big dream after four years.
Pieces of emotion and esteem mended
Gradually over three years.
Try again my child!
The real world
Reasonable most events
But the measures needed to create
Greater understanding by the real world
Harder and harder to teach.
A stone heart of comprehension,
Even the so-called educated ones that did so.
The Law is written
Thus so for some years
The paper it is written upon
Worthless and flimsy,
Holds words lacking truth in substance.
Recourse....
To depend on developing my very unique skills
To Be My Own Boss!
In essence
Telling the world to flush itself down the drain
Of ignorance, discrimination and failure to try to understand.
I am Done with many of Them.
Although they do not know it.
I know how to play the game of “Let’s Pretend” very well.
It is a nauseating game, but one of survival for me.
Less drain on me most of the time
Frees my mind to think on a higher or more intellectual plain.
Frankly, many of my teacher coworkers bore me
But I accept them as they are.
Why can't people accept me as I am?
I do now have “mind challenging” friends.
Males with some females
Had mostly male friends growing up, in high school and in college
Males don’t deny their intellectual brain “power”!
My father and his mother encouraged me in my intellectual pursuits.
They are part of me
They are me along with my faith
My love of others
My EARS and everything else.
Smarts were curried and favored when I was a child.
Not any more
I resent it at times.
Susan Jane Sturgis lives in Texas. She is writing a memoir titled “Damn the Ears,” based on this poem she originally wrote in 1995. She shares, “The cynicism of that time period is obvious in the poem's tone,” but with the book project and the encouragement of her husband she is more hopeful today.
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Partial silence/Hours in thought and talk/My dog listened and understood/Time in hours on the old back porch/I was in my own safe, social world.