Mark's Story

In construction, plastering means covering a damaged or unfinished surface with a material that smooths, strengthens, and protects what lies beneath. Mark Harder came from a family of plasterers and initially followed the same path. For years, his hands helped rebuild walls and teach others how to do so as well.

Then, after his own life fractured, Mark found a different kind of plaster.

Poetry.

One night after work, Mark called his wife to say goodnight. He was about to switch off the lamp beside his bed when suddenly, something felt terribly wrong.

“It felt like death, ” he recalls.

The night passed through waves of severe cramping and numbness. By morning, Mark was confused. Words no longer came easily. Tasks that had once required no thought became difficult.

His memory of what followed exists in flashes.

He tried to go to work.

A coworker arrived with EMTs and police officers.

Then, he was in a Baltimore hospital.

Mark felt the life he had known slipping away between those moments.

In the days that followed, Mark was transferred to Jefferson Hospital in Philadelphia, where his wife and children visited him frequently. He began the demanding process of rehabilitation, relearning skills that had once been automatic: walking, speaking, and navigating a world that suddenly felt unfamiliar.

After his stroke, Mark developed aphasia, a language disorder that affects a person’s ability to speak. Finding words to express his thoughts became a challenge.

Physical and speech therapy helped Mark rebuild essential skills, but recovery required something beyond rehabilitation.

He needed to create again.

For a man whose life had revolved around building and repairing things with his hands, recovery could not only be about regaining what he had lost. He needed a way to construct something new.

Mark turned to poetry.

Before his stroke, he had never written poems, but he decided to start with a single one.

Several months later, he wrote another. Then another followed only weeks afterward. What began as a single challenge slowly became a practice. Mark started keeping a journal and pushed himself to write one poem every day.

At first, he wrote about what he knew best: construction. His earliest poems relied heavily on technical terms and familiar images from years of working as a plasterer. Those words were already deeply engraved in him, and so they became building blocks as he worked to reconstruct his relationship with language.

Over time, the themes expanded.

Mark began writing about whatever happened during his day: ordinary moments and reflections. Eventually, Mark’s confidence grew even more, and today, much of his writing centers on stroke and aphasia.

Through metaphor, Mark found ways to communicate emotions that ordinary conversation sometimes made difficult to express. Poetry allowed him to approach language differently. It challenged him to piece together the puzzle of words that evaded him and find new meaning to them.

Mark began publishing his poems on Facebook, where his writing connected him with people living through similar experiences. He formed relationships with other people affected by stroke and aphasia and connected with writers around the world whose own books and poetry explored those topics as well.

His voice, once made difficult to access, began reaching farther than it ever had before.

Mark eventually founded “Poems in Speech” and became president of the Mid-Atlantic Aphasia Conference. He now surrounds himself with people who continue searching for ways to communicate, advocate, and create, even when language itself has become difficult.

Mark’s story is one of power. Of courage. Of challenging the limits of the human mind.

As the foundations of his life began to crumble, he found the plaster that would take the existing fragments and secure a new foundation.

Mark became a poet.