Disaster strikes, from time to time, shaking us to our core. In these destabilizing moments, when our mettle is tested, we must reassess… everything.
As anyone who has experienced trauma knows, it takes time to heal and recover one’s balance.
Poetry helps me — reading and writing it. Here’s a poem that I wrote to get through a difficult time of my life, a veiled confession of betrayal:
Visceral
The watering holes are contaminated
animals stagger, wounded and wounding
strangling fierce and bewildered keening -
there is word of a stranger in the village
spreading like lengthening shadows
spilling into once safe, sunlit spaces
splotchy-blotchy, blemishing news
as expected as a natural disaster
all is wet with fear of the unknown
sky and earth quake and thunder
survival simplified to a difficult equation
under the dictate: overcome or perish
transcendence has become a necessity
no time for tears or breathless incredulity
time to summon powers once bragged of
submit to be tested as man and superman.