Ann Fisher-Wirth

My poem “Seventeenth Day in Rehab” centers on April 2025 when I had a hip replacement. Because my bones are thin from rheumatoid arthritis, my hip broke and the replacement had to be done all over again—this time, with screws to stabilize it. I spent a week in the hospital and then six weeks at Oxford Health and Rehab, in Oxford, Mississippi. Many studies have shown that being able to see something in the natural world outside a window helps patients in their recovery, and so it was with me. Confined to bed or a wheelchair, I spent hours and hours gazing at the beautiful little crepe myrtle tree outside my window—being reminded that there was a living world outside the sphere of human suffering. 

My poem “The Trail” celebrates the Whirlpool Trails, a network of walking trails converted from the old railway line that ran from Oxford to Water Valley, Mississippi, on which my husband and I have spent countless hours. Across a kudzu-covered gully in these Southern woods, someone has stretched Tibetan prayer flags on a high bluff among the trees, and we love to see them, also the fox and squirrels and birds and deer and groundhogs that sometimes appear. Like many of us, I tend to get lost in my head. But the world exists around us, plenteous, imperfect, a Heraclitean fire with parts of it kindling and parts of it going out, at every moment.