At The End Of My Eightieth Year by Rob Lowe

A large tree in the middle of green woodland. Large white text reads: At The End Of My Eightieth Year. Smaller text reads: Discussing disabled characters in fairy tales and folklore.

This is me:
A blood-damaged eye,
Inguinal hernias,
Deaf in one ear,
An arthritic knee,
An electronic heart.
 
So,
I cannot see, hear, walk
Or breathe well,
And this is every day.
 
Yet the thoughts are stronger,
My pasts become longer,
There is nowhere to go
But the future.
 
Thence, who knows what I will be.
In the meanwhile. there are many who care.
But this is my eighty-first year –
And what is my way
Is an uncertain fear
Of today. 

---

About the author:
Rob Lowe feels somehow surprised and grateful to have reached eighty, and to be happy sharing a home in Milton Keynes (U.K.) with an epidemiologist niece who also acts as his carer. He has been writing therapeutically for much of his life, but submitting work for publication only during the last six years, with some success, after early discouragements. Dwell Time, a mental health/literary/arts magazine, has accepted pieces, as have Seventh Quarry, Aromatica Poetica, Disability Arts Cymru, and other sympathetic print and online journals.