The origin of the word trauma
Is not just "wound,"but "piercing"or"turning"
As blades do when finding home
Grief commands its own grammar
Structured by intimacy & imagination
We often say:
We are beside ourselves with grief
We can't even imagine
This means anguish can call us to envision
More than what we believed was carriable
Or even survivable
This is to say, there does exist
A good grief
The hurt is how we know
We are alive &awake
It clears us for all the exquisite
Excruciating enormities to come.
We are pierced new by the turning
Forward
All that is grave need
Not be a burden, an anguish
Call it,instead, an anchor,
Grief grounding us in its sea.
Despair exits us the same way it enters
Turning through the mouth
Even now conviction works
Strange magic on our tongues
We are built up again
By what we
Build /find /see/say/remember/know
Where we carry means we survive
It is what survives us
We have survived us
Where once we were alone
Now we care besides ourselves
Where once we were barbed &brutal as blades
Now we can only imagine
This book ,like a ship,is meant to be lived in
Are we not the animals,two by two
Heavy hearted & hoofed, horned
Marching into the ark of our lives
We,the mammals marked to sea.
