Carol Townsend

My life has been touched by cancer in three different ways. A number of years ago,

my mother passed away six months after she was diagnosed with acute leukemia. My late husband died from a non-inherited, non-lifestyle soft tissue sarcoma after a six-year struggle. Five years after he passed, I was diagnosed with breast cancer

Through it all, poetry was the lens through which I could examine and deal with these very emotional and painful times in my life. And heal. It is my hope that these poems will help someone else through their own ordeal(s)…

 is about the spread of my husband’s cancer.

 is a playful riff on hair loss and the wearing of wigs while it regrows.

*Both of these poems have been published in my full-length book of poetry, “The Color of Shadows.”

Suppose that I never had learned to write poetry

Suppose that I had become a studio potter

Suppose that my father had gone to college

Suppose that my sister had not been overweight

Suppose that my mother’s leukemia had not been acute

Suppose that I had arrived before she passed into unconsciousness

Suppose that I had not left the hospital just before my husband died

than it had been in sixty thousand years.

white. “Figure I should wear stilettos,

for fear of turning these synthetic tresses

People ask “who is your hairdresser?”

Say I should always wear my hair like this.

This post was written and submitted by Carol Townsend. The article reflects the views of Townsend and not of CURE®. This is also not supposed to be intended as medical advice.

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Through it all, poetry was the lens through which I could examine and deal with these very emotional and painful times in my life. 

Carol Townsend

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