A vitiligo poem

Last Updated on 4th January 2019 by Caroline Haye

Vitiligo

For years, longing long years
I mourned my smooth, young honey-hued, freckle-filled summers.

My tears, pander-eyed tears
Trickled down the furtive, long-sleeved, camouflaged decades.

I hoped hopeless hopes
That the pallid,white-lashed jig-saw stranger in the mirror should leave.

My fears, shadowy fears
Multiplied, forming stark splashes across the carefree canvas of my psyche.

Resigned, and re-designed
The pattern of my life became cheery-faced denial-by-self-tan.

And there, just where despair
Had me in its mottled, stubborn, white-knuckled, piebald grip

The long, long, longed-for thing
Occurred – showering my bleached body and soul with golden shards of joy.

The white, bright white
Which blighted my confidence and leached the tones from my being

Is going, going, gone
And I am once again becoming who I always so secretly and subcutaneously was.

I’m me… I’m free
And blissfully, gratefully, ecstatically aware that the final letters of my life’s curse are…

  I go.

© Vitiligoprotocol 2011