Magazine Monday: a poetic disease description

Today's Magazine Monday feature comes from one of my favorite magazines, The Sun (not to be confused with the British tabloid of the same name). It is completely ad-free, full of beautiful, wonderful writing on a large variety of meaningful and interesting topics. It's expensive, though, so while I just indulged in a free sample issue I cannot afford it right now. I hope to subscribe again at some point in the future, though, and I would love to be published in this publication someday.

In the essay Bruised, Joe Wilkins meditates upon the body and its fragility and meaning after getting elbowed in the face during a basketball game. Midway through this richly evocative reflection, Wilkins writes about his brother:

"People pass by us each day and read our bodies, marked like great ash trees - pearl bark ribboned with hearts and arrows and what all else - and wonder.

Consider my brother, who some years ago was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. MS is an autoimmune disease, the sufferer's own immune system mounting a furious and deleterious insurrection, scraping away the myelin that insulates neuron connections in the brain. My brother woke one morning and was blind in his left eye, the whole left half of him gone shifty and slack."

The brother and his MS are minor, passing characters in this essay, but I think the above description is quite lovely. I'm a sucker for words well combined, even when they are describing something I don't like at all.