Sunday, September 23, 2018
Picture Poem
My poem depicts a moment from December 2017. My father had a malignant melnoma on his ear that he was set to have removed after the holidays. While on vacation in New Hampshire with the rest of my family, he began to feel some eye soreness. That soreness turned into some sort of infection that was related to his stress and diabetes around the time, and forced him to postpone the removal of his skin cancer to have his eye operated on. After the operation, he was left without vision in his eye with close to zero likelihood that it will ever return. He then took to having the melanoma removed from his ear followed by radiation therapy. When removing the growth from his ear, the doctors hit a nerve which basically froze up one side of his face for a period of a few months, forcing him to blink his one good eye manually with his finger. As of last week, my father is cancer free. He lost thirty pounds and controlled his diabetes for the first time since being diagnosed, He missed almost no work throughout both of his treatments, and didn't seem to be slowed down whatsoever. My father is my hero. This poem takes place shortly after his eye first began to bother him. Tensions were extremely high, and it provided a very interesting holiday season. Regardless, our family rallied around him during his fight, and subsequently a lot of really necessary healing occurred. I went with fairly ominous pictures to set the mood. The only picture that is my own is the title page that my brother took while on a doctor's visit with my dad. The black and white filter he chose was fitting. I hope you enjoy.
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Okay, you took a little bit of a different approach then others here by writing about the piece and then giving us snippets of the words and images to relay the mood you were trying to convey. Thematically, this is a very rich topic because you're tapping into the viewer's own greatest fears--loss, illness, death. I'm so glad that your dad is cancer-free. For the video aspect of this piece, keep the viewer in mind at all times. I'm a pretty fast reader and I couldn't keep pace with the slides. Slow down, and choose your moments where you slow down--that is where you can place emphasis. I wonder too if you considered using yoru own photos? There's a consistency here visually (more or less), but you could have made this even more poignant if you had considered allowing yourself to use your own images. I liked that use of the clock as an ongoing metaphor--this idea that we all face a ticking clock, whether we like it or not.
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