The Quiet Resistance: Poems of Exile and Defiance

Publisher’s Foreword

In a world increasingly preoccupied with youth and independence, Howard F. Stein offers us an unflinching glimpse into one of society’s most overlooked spaces: the assisted living facility. Through seven carefully crafted poems, Stein transforms what many would consider a final destination into a starting point for profound reflection on identity, nature, memory, and resistance.

These poems were not written from a comfortable distance. They emerge directly from Stein’s lived experience as a resident in an assisted living home since early 2023. What makes this collection remarkable is not merely its subject matter but its perspective—one rarely documented with such clarity and literary skill. Where others might see only limitations, Stein finds moments of transcendence: a patch of red leaves visible through a lobby window, the moon rising between buildings, the startling whiteness of Styrofoam containers during Sunday supper.

Stein’s work challenges our cultural narratives about aging and care. Without sentimentality or self-pity, he documents both the institutional realities of assisted living and the interior life that continues to flourish despite external constraints. His “accidental acts of defiance” remind us that personhood persists even when autonomy diminishes. Each poem bears witness to what is lost in the transition to institutional care while simultaneously affirming what remains: the capacity for observation, memory, wonder, and critique.

The collection oscillates between resignation and resistance, between acceptance and yearning. In “Patch of Autumn Red,” Stein asks himself whether he is “content with this mere tincture of fall” visible from his window. His answer—“No… but I take pleasure in this accidental act of defiance”—serves as a thesis statement for the entire collection. These poems themselves become acts of defiance, insisting on the value of individual experience within systems designed for efficiency and safety rather than fulfillment.

For healthcare professionals and families navigating elder care decisions, Stein’s work provides an essential perspective often missing from clinical discussions. For literary readers, these poems offer masterful craft in service of urgent human questions. And for all of us who someday will face diminished capacity, Stein’s voice reminds us that interior life remains rich even when external circumstances narrow.

We are honored to publish this collection and grateful to Howard F. Stein for his courage in documenting this chapter of life with such honesty and grace. These poems stand as testament to the continuing power of literature to illuminate even the most overlooked corners of human experience.

Inna Rozentsvit, March 2025

The following is the collection of poems that are followed by the backstories provided by the author:

(1) Patch of Autumn Red      
(2) Sunday Supper in a Sea of White, Old Folks Home
(3) Full Moon in Corridor 
(4) Holding on to Fall
(5) Somewhere, Beyond Here     
(6) Yearn the Impossible
(7) Finding You

(1)
Patch of Autumn Red

Backstory to “Patch of Autumn Red”:

This poem emerged from my keen and painful sense of isolation from Nature, the Seasons, and from most ordinary human contact (houses, neighborhoods, trees, business establishments) that comes from living, now for over two years, in an assisted living facility. It is, I believe, a way of “processing” my sense of loss and of grief.

As a social movement, later institutionalized, since the late 1970’s, assisted living residential facilities arose from the social need and wish for families to place family members who were either too ill or disabled for them to care for any longer, or because they were exhausted from it, or they simply wished to have their own lives freed from caring for this person. Families thus often “placed” their family member with or without the person’s involvement in decision-making.

The medical “solution” often came at a grievous price for the person-now-patient, who felt exiled and abandoned, uprooted from a sense of place and identity, loss of a sense of meaning and connectedness to the world, and feelings of desolation and isolation – all factors that were not part of the conscious “equation” the family used in thinking primarily of the patient’s medical needs.

This poem emerges from my sense of loss and grief at experiencing the seasons through all the changes in Nature, including the change of tree leaves’ colors during the cool, reduced sunlight, days of autumn.

(2)
Sunday Supper in a Sea of White, Old Folks Home

Backstory to “Sunday Supper in a Sea of White, Old Folks Home”:

Since early January of 2023, I have lived in the assisted living section of an old folks’ home. Although I am a resident/patient here, I try to observe attentively the world in which I am immersed and largely confined, and to write about my experiences. Of the countless rituals here and in all medical facilities, one that immediately caught my attention, is what I came to call “Styrofoam Sunday.”

I should add that, to my delight, the phrase has been adopted by many other residents as a kind of spoof. For the Sunday evening meal in the dining room, instead of the usual “institutional” ceramic and glassware, and metal eating utensils, all food and drink are contained in Styrofoam boxes and cups, and eating utensils are plastic.

In part, this Sunday supper practice allows our hard-working kitchen staff to have some time off. For me, though, the visual effect – and sense of egregious waste and environmental contamination – is overwhelming. The uniform whiteness is almost blinding me. I watch the servers bring from the kitchen food carts piled tall with Styrofoam boxes, distribute them to the residents, retrieve them as some residents are leaving or after they have left, and pile them anew on the carts. They then return the carts to the kitchen and presumably dispose of this mass of Styrofoam in the outside dumpsters. I should add that the drinking cups for hot and cold beverages are also Styrofoam. This poem emerges from that recurrent at once amusing and somewhat horrifying experience.

(3)
Full Moon in Corridor

Backstory to “Full Moon in Corridor”:

In language and in logic, the term oxymoron refers to the linkage of words or a phrase that feels contradictory, incongruous, often oppositional, words/ideas that “do not belong together” and that “make no sense.” True, they can be used for emotional or aesthetic effect, as in the phrase “deafening silence,” in which the sense of absence and void is paradoxically intensified. For the most part, when a reader or listener encounters them, one feels that the combination or association is “crazy,” and dismisses it.

When I read this poem now in 2025 that I wrote maybe forty years ago, the first thought that comes to mind is what an oxymoron this poem must seem to be. How could seeing a glorious, enlarged full moon just over the horizon have any connection with noticing it through a narrow opening between the backs of a string of ordinary, mostly small business stores: a gasoline station, a dry-cleaner, maybe a storefront church, a pizza shop? The buildings were already plain, uninviting, a little ratty looking from the front.

I had been living in a single row of condominiums, converted from apartments, behind this row of stores. I was walking down its driveway or alley that paralleled the stores. The stores were signs of neither urban decay nor splendor. Just plain. What would draw anyone’s eye to them? Then suddenly, in my slow walk behind the fence that separated the condos from the stores, I noticed this brilliant full moon in a gap between buildings.

Suddenly the unnoticeable became a corridor to a revelation. Not a simple cliché that beauty redeemed ugliness. Instead, for a lingering moment, the entire scene felt sacred, transfigured, that I had been bestowed a gift. I did not search for meaning. I was simply grateful for a juxtaposition I could never have prepared for or imagined. The prosaic had been transformed. From here the seed for the poem was planted.

(4)
Holding on to Fall

Backstory to “Holding on to Fall”:

This poem is thematically and emotionally close kin to the poem, “Patch of Autumn Red” in this collection. Its story is also the story beneath this poem, one of exile from home to a medical assisted living old folks’ facility, from a house embedded in trees within a virtually forested neighborhood, and its wider world of many neighbors who had long been friends, the seasons, the phases of the moon, the planets and stars in the night sky.

I suppose you could think of this poem, and of others here, as part of the process and journey of traumatic loss and mourning. If it was the experience of the loss of an entire world, and with it, the loss of my meaningful life. So much of my universe of life was bound up with sense of place, not merely place, but the whole web of connections, external and internal, that helped me to feel “at home.”

Then, with only a few days warning, and virtually no invitation by my family to involvement in the planning, I felt ripped away from a world I loved, and in which I felt I belonged, and placed ln an assisted living facility where my boxy room had only 400 square feet, and my window looked out to mostly asphalt and concrete parking lots, patches of grass, and more buildings. Bricks supplanted trees. My “move” to a new, supposedly medically necessary, life, felt like expulsion and rupture.

In the face of this “history,” my reality disappeared, and with it, my beloved season of autumn, during which I had sat back home on our little front porch for hours among the trees, squirrels, birds, the changing sky. How would or could I transform day-to-day life entirely into (selective) memory?  How could I bear to do so?  Many friends and relatives have admonished me to “Move on,” to “Let go of the past and start a new life.” They never told me to “Forget It,” but implied it. From what? To what? They never asked me about the significance of what I was obligated by default to leave behind and give up, because my family offered no other option.

They could only see, envision, the medical environment that would help me not to fall (because of Parkinson’s and other neurological “conditions”). They could only imagine gain (to an extent, their projection into me), not loss and grief and longing.

Now, living at the old folks’ home, what could I “do” with the world of connection and meaning I was compelled to leave behind? I could only draw on memory, recent and past – not only of what I saw, but what I smelled (blossoms, flowers, the approach of rain) and touched (the bark of my beloved scrub oak trees), and, even as my hearing was failing, heard.

Remembering was imagining; and sometimes, when it was so vivid, virtually re-living, as if in my mind I could walk back among the post oak and blackjack trees in my yard. I do not think I tried – or even needed – to force myself to re-member (put together again the past in my mind), as I was automatically doing it to contrast with the sparely landscaped, barren, brick-laden world of all these facilities, together with their endless striped parking lots.

After, say, a year at this facility, I began to realize that I was able less to draw upon memory. The institution, its rituals, its routines, its spaces, its isolation from the world of time and space, worked their way into me, as if their molecules could expel and replace my own – and try to become my own. I feared that I would become “institution” inside as well as outside. It became increasingly difficult to remember autumn as vividly, as fully, to immerse myself in it – even by looking at autumn scenes on the Internet and on television news.

I began to have the horrible feeling that I was unsure whether autumn ever really existed, that I ever dwelled in it. Maybe it was all a dream, a wish, a fantasy, a product of my imagination. Trying to retrieve fall became increasingly difficult, sometimes impossible. The story behind this poem, and of several others, in this collection, ends in a nightmare of loss, of doubt, and of emptiness.  All there was left of me, in me, was the institution.

So, in this poem, I hold on to this seemingly insignificant patch of red leaves as if my soul, if not my life, depended on it. At least for a moment, the perception, and the emotion behind it, connected me back with reality, and affirmed that reality other than institutional reality still existed.

(5)
Somewhere, Beyond Here

Backstory to “Somewhere, Beyond Here”:

I pose a question to you, my reader: Have you ever felt trapped in some kind of situation in which you could not physically leave, but in your mind, you discovered a way at least temporarily to escape?  To feel free even though in bondage?  It happens in families, in marriages, in workplaces, and in national politics. This poem emerges from that kind of situation and desperate hope.

The earth’s moon has been a Presence for me all my nearly 80 years of life. No silly mythical “man in the moon” or the moon “made of green cheese,” but a companion, a friend. In my adolescence I spent many hours with my telescope looking upon its surface. I kept time by it as much as by any human time-piece. It accompanied me on many walks. Whether outside or inside, I often looked for it in the sky, as if to calibrate my navigation through life.

If the moon orbits around the earth (more precisely, both of them around a common center of gravity), I have emotionally orbited around the moon from my childhood. I have composed poems about the moon. Though I knew the moon was not a person, neither was it dead rock.

Then, about 2 ½ years ago, my family placed me in a large assisted living facility, 2-3 story large boxy brick buildings with windows, and boxy living units or apartments of only 400-500 square feet. Many of these complexes were built near one another, accompanied by nursing homes, skilled nursing facilities, and the like, located fairly remote on the border of Oklahoma City and barren surroundings.

It required effort – especially for those of us with canes, walkers, and wheelchairs, to venture far enough outside away from the buildings, to find open space to observe the night sky. The area was heavily populated by blaring spotlights and city lights. At best, I could see the moon, perhaps the planets Venus, Jupiter, and Mars and only the brightest star or two.  It did not take long for me to feel isolated from, and deprived of, the real, natural world.

This story is the backdrop to the brief poem – about searching, yearning, absence, gratitude for brief appearances of the moon, glimpses at specific times of the month, my increased loneliness, and a surreal sense of the simultaneous loss of the Real World and its replacement by a shrunken shell, felt both outside and inside me. With this storyline in mind, imagine yourself standing with me, in my 400 square foot apartment, looking out my window due west into a large assortment of bright city lights, a black sky inhabited with diffuse city lights, and a welcome brief visitation from the moon.

The story beneath this poem is similar to those of some other poems: painful doubt that flashes through mind that maybe the moon never really existed, or was only a product of my imagination, my desire, my yearning, my wish for a moon. It is a manifestation present only in my head, a chimerical representation. The joke is on me.

The poem, then, is a story that ends not only with sadness, but with a sense of the surreal. Did I ever “have” what I so painfully feel I have lost?

(6)
Yearn the Impossible

Backstory to “Yearn the Impossible”:

Who, at some time in their lives, has not yearned to run away, to escape – from a person, a situation, a place? Perhaps this poem, based on my personal experience, will resonate with, or rekindle a memory of, your own longing from out of your own life story. At 79, I have wanted to flee many times. My current circumstance, which ignited this poem, was my placement by my family, two and a half years ago, in an assisted living old folks’ home.

Over time, in various places, many kinds of relationships (especially marriage), jobs, situations, an aging body we hardly recognize as our-selves, we begin to think and feel and perceive, “That’s not like me. Who have I become? What have I become?” All these have come to feel like prisons to me at times throughout my life. I become an alien to my-self. Sometimes I can escape, many times I cannot. Even if I could take flight from “here,” where would or could I go, since I take my-self with me? And who and what is this “self” now?

I face reality, I accept reality, this reality – and then I revolt. Much as I try to resign myself to where and what I have become, I still want to run away. Even after nearly 2 ½ years after my family placed me in an assisted living facility “for my own good,” I still have many moments of doubt whether I truly need to be here – and the purity of their motives. Yet I know I cannot go back – in many senses of the word. Where I was exiled from is no longer the same as when I was evicted.  Still . . . I have not renounced the desire and fantasy of running away. I cannot imagine continuing to biologically exist and eventually die in this existential barrenness.

7.
Finding You

Backstory to “Finding You”:

Many years ago, a good poet and literary journal editor admonished me never to write a poem about a rose, or blossoms in spring, or hearts. The great, immortal poets had long ago written about these, he said, and no future poet could ever equal them. It was as if they “owned” the subject – and how dare someone trespass on their property!

This tiny poem, written long ago, risks the same admonition. Finding-a-ray-of-light-amidst-enveloping-darkness is a subject already exhausted, if not beaten to death by countless poets. “Who do you think you are to add another cliché to the heap?” I scold myself. I am always haunted by my own internal accusers as well as by the prospect of immediate rejection by poetry journal editors.

Still, those prayed-for breaks in a sky of menacing clouds are personal, even if they are widely shared. Those brief moments are uniquely mine, not exactly the same as yours. The fact that my kind of experience is familiar does not cancel the uniqueness of my own – and in turn, the story or poem I might write, or canvas I might paint, or music I might compose. If a poem can lead you to think or feel or experience something familiar in a new way; if it can give you back part of your own life; then it will be, perhaps, a cliché that has been redeemed, revived. No longer stale, but fresh – where it now refreshes you.