The Human Body is 60% Water

Perhaps that explains
why my legs want to swim
rather than carry me forward,
why my hips have forgotten
the rhythm of walking.
Once my brain savored the sky,
each cadence of birdsong.
Now it’s only aware of motion
and muscle, each watery bone,
as I gingerly make my way
down this straight line of sidewalk
as if it were a steep, wooded trail,
determined to accept this new normal,
grateful to be moving at all.

Judith Waller Carroll is the author of Ordinary Splendor (Moon Path Press 2022) and What You Saw and Still Remember, a runner-up for the 2017 Main Street Rag Poetry Award. Her chapbook The Consolation of Roses won the 2015 Astounding Beauty Ruffian Press Poetry Prize. She has been featured on Verse Daily and The Writer’s Almanac, published in numerous journals and anthologies, and nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. She blogs at inanotherdress.wordpress.com/.