On Insomnia by Laura Hershey
by Wayne Miller
Hi, I’m Wayne Miller. I’m a poet who lives in Denver, Colorado, and I’m here for Poets on the Plains.
Today I’m going to read a poem by the poet Laura Hershey.
Hershey was born in 1962 in Littleton, Colorado, and as a young child was diagnosed with Spinal Muscular Atrophy, a rare genetic disease. She used a wheelchair throughout her life.
An excellent student, Hershey won a Watson Fellowship to study in Great Britain after graduating from Colorado College, and in the 1980s she and other activists began protesting the Denver bus system’s lack of accessibility by barricading themselves around buses, refusing to allow them to move. This sort of proactive, bodily activism was instrumental in prompting Congress to pass the Americans with Disabilities Act in 1990, and Hershey became an outspoken leader in the disability rights movement, arguing through a variety of means and venues that disabled people should be empowered, not pitied.
Hershey was also a poet. Her poems are often politically engaged, sometimes galvanizing the disability rights movement toward common purpose, sometimes describing disabled experience for an able-bodied audience in an effort to make clear the full humanity of disabled people. Still other poems are more interiorized and meditative, more traditionally “lyrical.”
In 2019, excellent poets Meg Day and Niki Herd edited the book Laura Hershey: On the Life & Work of an American Master, which gathers many of Hershey’s poems alongside essays on the importance of Hershey’s work and a variety of images offered by the Denver Public Library, which holds Hershey’s papers in is archive.
The poem I’m going to read is a something of a love poem—a poem about domestic life in a long-term partnership—in this case presumably a poem for Robin Stephens, who was Hershey’s partner of twenty years—until Hershey’s tragic early death in 2010 at the age of 48. The poem is called Insomnia:
INSOMNIA
While you sleep, I stir
the stew of our late night spat,
polish a pea of gravel stuck
in our sock-like fit.
I wail, rail at you
to rewrite the fight, dislodge the grudge
with tender apology.
On your side, sleep has already
softened the stone to nothingness
but I hold tight to hurt
slicking it to pearl.
While you sleep, I stir
the rain-lush scent of lust satisfied
that's left me wide
open and astonished;
your soft breath-gusts
brush my upper arm,
replay our rhythm.
It's lullaby to you;
to me it's hullabaloo.
This is how we lie sleeping,
or waiting for sleep:
on your right side, my left;
arm over back, cheek under hand,
elbow against wrist, pulses joined,
a soft throb of connection that will last
until you turn over, or I do.
This is how we live: sleeping
seals the deals we make by light;
we neighbor our enfleshed bones
like poems bound by pages.
While you sleep, I stir
those pages, and imagine poems uncollected.
I keep awake, keep us alive.
Wordgathering: A Journal of Disability Poetry and Literature,
Volume 1. Issue 3
I love, in this poem, the three brief scenes of insomnia that Hershey offers—the first after a fight, the second after sex, the third a more narratively unexceptional insomnia—just a regular night. What Hershey captures so beautifully in these scenes is the simultaneous connection and disconnection two partners can feel lying in bed together, particularly when one of them is asleep. They’re right next to each other—even touching—yet separated by sleep’s heavy curtain. They are, as Hershey implies, like separate poems in the same book.
If you’re interested in learning more about Laura Hershey and her work—or just in reading more of her beautiful poems—please go pick up a copy of Laura Hershey: On the Life & Work of an American Master.
I’m Wayne Miller. Thanks for listening, and best wishes.
POETS ON THE PLAINS HOST
WAYNE MILLER (b. 1976) is the author of six poetry collections, most recently The End of Childhood (Milkweed Editions, 2025). His awards include the Rilke Prize, two Colorado Book Awards, a Pushcart Prize, an NEA Translation Fellowship, six awards from the Poetry Society of America, and a Fulbright to Northern Ireland. He has co-translated two books by the Albanian writer Moikom Zeqo—most recently Zodiac (Zephyr Press, 2015)—and he has co-edited three books, most recently Literary Publishing in the Twenty-First Century (Milkweed Editions, 2016). He lives in Denver, where he teaches at the University of Colorado Denver and edits the journal Copper Nickel. http://waynemillerpoet.com/
FEATURED POET
LAURA HERSHEY (1962–2010) was a poet and disabilities activist. During her lifetime, she published poems in numerous periodicals and anthologies, and she was the author of Survival Strategies for Going Abroad: A Guide for People with Disabilities (Mobility International USA, 2005). Her chapbook of poems Spark Before Dark (Finishing Line Press, 2011) was published shortly after her death, and the book Laura Hershey: On the Life and Work of an American Master (Pleiades Press, 2019), edited by Meg Day and Niki Herd, collects Hershey’s poems alongside essays on her literary importance. Hershey lived in Englewood, Colorado, just outside Denver. https://laurahershey.com/
Wordgathering: A Journal of Disability Poetry and Literature (ISSN: 2690-7089) is a digital, Open Access journal of disability poetry, literature, and the arts. Submission and biannual publication are free. Authors and other contributors retain copyright to their work. Effective Volume 14, Issue 2 (June 2020), work is published here under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International license. This arrangement is made possible by generous support from the Office of Interdisciplinary Programs and Outreach at the Burton Blatt Institute (housed in the College of Law at Syracuse University) and the Syracuse University Libraries.
