I wrote a poem this week called The Hum of Lines.
It is not a bright poem.
It sits in the quiet room.
It listens to the machine.
It hears the slow, steady movement of blood through borrowed pathways.
Dialysis has a soundscape. The hum of the pump. The soft alarms. The rhythm that is not quite your own, but keeps you alive. Three times a week, it becomes the background music of survival.
The poem begins with longing—for frost, for wind, for a bench in a shed, for the sharp honesty of winter air. It allows the darker thoughts to speak plainly. When your life is measured in sessions and fluid balances, it is not strange to wonder what “rest” might mean in a deeper sense.
Chronic illness has a way of thinning the veil between endurance and surrender. And I think it’s important to say that out loud. Not dramatically. Not despairingly. Just honestly.
But the poem does not stay there.
It turns.
It remembers love.
It remembers that leaving would not be a solitary act. That survival is not only biological—it is relational. There is someone who would be left facing the world alone. There is shared life. Shared benches. Shared ordinary mornings still to come.
Faith, in this poem, is not thunder. It is steadiness.
Not escape—but call.
“Your task’s not done.”
The resolution is not triumphal. It is chosen.
I choose to stay.
To breathe.
To love.
The hum of lines continues. But so does love. And for now, that is enough.
To Andrew.
Because honey badgers don’t quit.
Still here, still held, still us.
I sit within the quiet room,
Yet long for wind and sky;
For frost upon the garden shed
And birds that flicker by.
The bench that waits within the shed
Still holds its winter chill;
It calls me out to breathe the cold
And sit a moment still.
The robin’s song is clearer there,
The dawn more sharp and true;
The world feels nearer to my hand,
Its edges bright with dew.
But winter’s beauty cuts as well,
Its cold can take too deep;
The frost that glitters on the roof
Could steal a final sleep.
The days grow long on weary hours,
Three times each week I go;
The hum of lines, the waiting still,
The slow and patient flow.
At times I wonder, worn and thin,
What rest with God might be;
A simple seat beyond the veil,
A gentler breath for me.
But if I reached that quiet place
And stood before His throne,
What words would meet my trembling heart
For leaving love alone?
I hear Him say, “Your task’s not done,
Your life is not yet fled;
You’re needed in the world you share,
Not on this distant stead.”
And more than that, I see the truth
That steadies every bone:
To slip away would break the one
Who’d face the world alone.
So though the days on dialysis
Can press me to the core,
I choose to stay, to breathe, to love,
And walk beside once more.
The shed can wait, the bench can wait,
The frost can keep its plea;
The birds still sing beyond the pane,
And love stays here with me.
And when the warmer days return,
With gentler light and air,
I’ll sit with Andrew on that bench—
Still here, still held, still there.
A stained-glass window in an arched church frame depicting a winter-to-spring scene of endurance and hope. On the left, a middle-aged man sits connected to a dialysis machine inside a small shed, gazing out at a snow-covered garden. A red-breasted robin perches on the frosted windowsill, and a wooden bench stands outside under a pale winter sky. Above, Christ appears in golden light, emerging from clouds with one hand raised in blessing, rays spreading across the glass.
The lower right panel shifts to warmer colours: the same man, now free of medical lines, sits beside another man on a wooden bench in a sunlit garden filled with flowers and green trees. The two men sit close together, facing the light, suggesting companionship and shared hope. The contrast between icy blues and radiant golds conveys struggle, faith, love, and the choice to remain present in life.
NeuroDivine 
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