Scars of Sight: World Poetry Day

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Scars of Site, 2026, Poem and digital photograph

For World Poetry Day, I wanted to share a piece that sits at the edge of language — where writing begins to fail slightly, and the body takes over.

The poem below began with a question that felt difficult to articulate directly:what happens to the body when something is seen that cannot be un-seen?

We often think of vision as passive — as something that simply receives the world. But this poem resists that idea. It understands seeing as an event. Something that enters, alters, and remains.

The lines move through the language of damage and adaptation: scorching, clouding, softening. The eye becomes not just an organ of perception, but a site of negotiation — caught between exposure and protection. What begins as clarity gradually becomes something more unstable, more defensive. Vision shifts from openness to refusal.

This is where the body becomes central.

Because the poem suggests that when the mind cannot process something fully, the body intervenes. It adjusts perception. It blurs. It filters. Not as failure — but as survival.

What began to interest me was the idea that the eyes themselves might respond — not just emotionally, 

As if vision could scar.

In the poem, the irises are imagined as something that has been burned — held too long in proximity to something unbearable. Not destroyed, but altered. Marked. The suggestion of cataracts forming becomes less medical and more symbolic: a thin veil growing across the surface of sight, not as failure, but as intention.

A self-made obstruction.

As though the body, unable to erase what has been seen, attempts instead to dim it. To soften its edges. To place something — anything — between itself and the image.

It is not blindness.

It is refusal.

And yet, the poem resists the idea that this strategy can ever fully succeed.

Because even when vision is interrupted, the image does not disappear.

It relocates.

It persists behind the eyes — fixed, internal, unreachable. Something that returns in fragments, especially in moments of stillness. In darkness. In the quiet just before sleep.

You can close your eyes, but you cannot unsee.

That tension — between wanting not to see and being unable to forget — sits at the centre of the work. And perhaps that is where it becomes most personal.

Because the body does not simply witness.

It carries.

The idea that “clarity itself had become dangerous” is crucial here. It reframes visibility not as truth, but as risk.

Beneath the poem, the image operates as a visual extension of this idea.

A face appears behind water filled glass — distorted, partially obscured. The surface is marked with droplets that could be condensation, breath, or time itself. They resemble tears, but never fully resolve into them. The figure is visible, but not fully accessible.

Most importantly, the eye — the site of perception — is present, yet disrupted.

It is seen, but not clearly.It looks, but cannot fully hold what it sees.

The image and the poem work together to explore a shared tension: the impossibility of clean vision. There is always interference. Always a surface. Always something between.

Even the structure of the poem reflects this.

Certain lines are tightened — the spacing between letters reduced:

• It marks.

• There it is again.

• as though clarity itself had become dangerous.

• But the body does not forget.

These moments interrupt the visual rhythm of the text. They feel compressed, almost held in place. Less like lines to be read, and more like points of pressure — where language condenses into something harder, more insistent.

They do not flow. They resist.

That resistance mirrors the poem’s central idea: that some experiences do not integrate smoothly into narrative or memory. They return in fragments. They interrupt. They insist on being felt rather than explained.

What remains, in the end, is not a clear image, but an internal one.

An afterimage.

Something that no longer exists in front of the body, but continues to exist within it — lodged behind the eyes, beyond reach, beyond language.

Poetry, at its most precise, does not resolve this kind of experience. It doesn’t offer closure.

It simply gives it form.

I think this is why I’m drawn to writing like this — where the line between seeing and feeling dissolves. Where the body speaks in ways language can only partially hold.

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Full poem below:

Scars of Sight

Seeing is not passive.

It enters the body.

It marks.

There are images that do not leave politely—

they press themselves into the softest part of vision

and stay there,

unmoving.

At first it was only a brightness.

A kind of overexposure.

As if the world had been held too close to flame.

Then something in the eyes began to change.

The irises—

once clear, reflective—

felt scorched,

like glass left too long in heat.

I began to imagine a thin film forming

just beneath the surface,

a clouding,

a slow and careful obscuring,

as though the body were trying

to grow its own curtain.

Not blindness—

something more deliberate than that.

A refusal.

Because there are things

the eyes should not have to carry.

And yet they do.

Even closed,

the image persists—

fixed behind the lids

like an afterburn,

like light that has nowhere else to go.

I learned the way it returns

without warning—

in the dark,

in quiet rooms,

in the small pause before sleep

when the body softens

and the mind loosens its grip.

There it is again.

Not whole—

never whole—

but in fragments:

a colour

a movement

a shape that cannot be unnamed

enough to know

too much to escape.

The body, always adapting,

began its quiet work.

If the world wounds through sight,

then sight must be altered.

So the eyes dimmed themselves—

softened edges

blurred distances

let detail dissolve

as though clarity itself

had become dangerous.

As though to see less

might be a form of survival.

I wondered

if this is how forgetting begins—

not as absence

but as interference,

a gentle distortion

laid carefully over memory

like gauze over a wound.

But the body does not forget.

It stores.

It reroutes.

It buries light in darker places.

And so the image remains,

not in front of me

but within me—

stitched somewhere

behind the eyes,

where no hand can reach it,

where no closing of the lids

can undo what has already

been seen.

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Some images do not leave.

They change the way we see everything that comes after.