My Cancer as a Ring-Tailed Lemur by Kathryn Bevis

The Poetry Archive Now! WordView 2023 Entry

Poet’s Biography
My pamphlet 'Flamingo' (Seren) was a Poetry Society’s ‘Book of the Year,’ 2022, shortlisted for the Saboteur Award for Best Poetry Pamphlet, and my collection 'The Butterfly House' (Seren) is due in 2024. Poems of mine have won the: Wales Poetry Award, Crysse Morrison Award and co-won the Mairtín Crawford Award and the Poetry Society Members’ Competition. A poem of mine is currently shortlisted for the Forward Prize, Best Single Poem (Written).

Poem Description / Inspiration
I wrote this shortly after my diagnosis with stage four/metastatic breast cancer. Surrounded by well-meaning friends, some of whom were telling me how 'strong' and 'brave' I was being, I was often exhorted me to 'kick cancer's arse.' For me, the language of battle and war was completely alien. In response, I was able to identify with compassion towards my cancer as a creature, a living thing with whom I was cohabiting with in this body of mine.

Poem Text
We both know one day she’ll eat me.
But, for now, we dance: a little game
of catch me if you can. Tracking her
is difficult. But specialists are interested
and, bit by bit, they creep inside my body’s

forest, stalk her with their fancy cameras,
take images, write reports. On ultrasound,
she’s punk-rock stripes of white and black.
On mammograms, she sunbathes, downy
as a dandelion gone to seed.

The child I am divines the time by blowing.
Five years, ten years, twenty, more. That’s
when they spy her, up in the canopy,
her tail Rapunzel’s plait looped
round a single sentinel node. Now, on MRI,

they spot her kindly spaniel’s face
crammed into the lettuce of my breast.
At last, on PET-CT, they catch her
on the move. She’s up and off alright: a lope,
a leap. She careens through my branches,

omnivorous for bone and liver, brain.
Because her nature is to double herself
again, again, she and her sisters huddle, tails
conjoined, tiny arms about each other’s necks.
The child I am learns to prophesy afresh,

blows one year, two years, four years, five.
Friends say this is war and I’m a warrior,
a tower of strength. But the lemur and I
get on okay. I figure she has a right to be here.
She is, in some important sense, endangered too.

I draw the line at poisoning but let
the hunters starve her, most days. She looks
at me with orange eyes of ire as we witness our
habitat’s destruction. My new need for naps,
my breathlessness – for both of us a forest fire.