Poet Lenka Podhradská

21 / Nov / 2023

Poetry (also) from HENDI CENTRE: Lenka has been writing poems for almost a quarter of a century

Our client Lenka, whom we regularly meet in the gym and in the corridors of our facility accompanied by her parents, has already published five collections of poetry. Cerebral palsy may have confined her to a wheelchair, but her soul has remained free. From an early age, she was "flying" in the land of imagination and dreams.

Gloria during rehabilitation in HENDI CENTRE

Poems about beauty and joy of life

Lenka celebrated her 36th birthday in July this year. Despite being severely physically handicapped since birth, she is able to follow her dream with perseverance and determination. She comes to the HENDI CENTRE from Nitra for therapy. Thanks to the rehabilitation sessions, she not only draws new life force, but also inspiration for her work.

She liked to read poetry since childhood

At the age of twelve, poetry grew so close to her heart that she gradually began to weave her thoughts into verse, and so her first poems were written. The poems grew in number until they finally fit into three collections, which were published in 2016 in the book Poetic Confessions. Lenka really wanted a book whose cover could be knocked on, which is why she received her first hardback book as a present for her twenty-fifth birthday.

As she says herself, the muse visits her regularly and the poems keep coming. In her poems, she expresses the beauty and joy of her life despite a severe diagnosis that limits her movement and verbal communication. The poems are an expression of her experiences that she has lived through thanks to her loving family and great friends.

"I've been writing since 1999. At first they were such simple rhetorical poems, but gradually longer and more complex poems were added. At first the theme was Christmas, friends ... . As I am older, it is also about life, about good and bad, about love or happiness," she revealed.

Night Owl

Lenka likes to create at night. She can sit at the computer for hours. Sometimes she manages to connect the letters into rhymes immediately, other times it takes her longer. She uses only one, right, hand when typing. Her left hand does not obey her because of her diagnosis. "When she needs to type an exclamation mark, she yells at me across two rooms, "Ocinóóó, come on!" Lenka's father, sitting next to us, joins our conversation with a laugh. "I don't write poems one after the other, sometimes it's been half a year since I've written anything, it doesn't come that automatically. Now I have a sixth collection of poems in progress on my computer, and I have 27 poems in it already. If it were in my power, I would have published it by now, but we will see when it will finally see the light of day," Lenka reveals.

Physiotherapy group in HENDI her "heart's affair"

As we learned during our interview, the young poet is driven by friends and family, and while her immediate goal in writing is to publish her sixth book of poetry, we were also interested in her goals in rehabilitation. "My rehabilitation goal is mainly to sit up straight because I have trouble sitting up, I would like to stop rocking. I wish I could stand up as well, I have tried the uprighting machine and it was something new for me. At HENDI I find the rehabilitation absolutely great because the physiotherapy group is perfect and I have known them for a long time. I wouldn't even go to another group. I really like the swimming pool, the hydro-massage bath and your water world in general," she said.

Lenka, who likes to attend various social events and concerts in her spare time, is a clear example of the fact that although she has been diagnosed with a serious illness, with it came a great gift of creativity and determination to cope with the consequences of the disease. On behalf of the entire HENDI CENTER team, we keep our fingers crossed for her in life!