Between Lenses Poem by Henrietta Ezegbe

First,
I learned
to see the body.

Its signals.
Its silence.

The small language
of what hurts
before it has a name.

Then
I learned
to step back.

Far enough
to see the pattern.

The illness
was never only
inside the person.

There were roads
that determined
who arrived.

Policies
that decided
who waited.

Rooms
that made some lives
easier to keep healthy
than others.

And still
the person remained.

Not a statistic.
Not a risk factor.
Not an outcome
waiting to be improved.

A life.

So I kept
another lens nearby.

Stories.
Images.
Questions
without clean variables.

The strange intelligence
of making something
that cannot be measured
still matter.

Because sometimes
what the numbers
leave out
is not noise.

It is the person.

Somewhere between
the individual
and the population,

between evidence
and imagination,
between prevention
and possibility,

I stopped asking
which way
I was supposed
to look.

Perhaps the mistake
was believing
there was only
one direction.

A body
can carry
a history.

A system
can carry
a consequence.

A policy
can become
a waiting room.

A number
can describe
a pattern

without telling you
what it cost
to become one.

There are things
you can only see
from a distance.

There are things
distance makes
impossible to see.

So I move
between them.

Closer.
Farther.
Closer again.

Not searching
for the one lens
that explains everything,

but learning
when to change
the aperture.

The body
can tell you
what the system
cannot.

The system
can reveal
what the body
cannot see.

Neither
is the whole picture.

But held together,

they begin
to show
one another.

Perhaps this
is what the work
has been teaching me:

not to choose
between the parts,

but to stay long enough
at the intersection

to notice
what becomes visible
when they meet.

The intersection
is not where
the paths disappear.

It is where
they begin
to reveal
one another.