National Poetry Month III

Treasure Your Grief

Not like a piece of jewellery kept in a box

but a scar across your face

a house plant blooming where sun

glares through a window.

Go back to that time—

the sunny afternoon in the park

you didn’t question

your feelings sweeping you out

from childhood to another’s body

so close it enters like a possession

a desire that doesn’t name itself

cut by fear

this is how women are destroyed

and you run away

shut down the portal to pleasure

as you will do again and again.

Go back to the image you hold onto

the someday promised, this or this

the girl who gives because she feels

the movie star everyone wants but can’t have

the radiant flesh, the brilliant idea

all yours if you play your cards

right not wrong. Right not left. Right not alone,

starving or battered.

New dove, shapely, winged and wise, goddess poised

on the edge of a mountain in the clouds

ready to jump or fly to eternal glory

shattered by all the missteps, mistakes and failings

the undeniable proof of your unremarkable humanity

your place in the anonymous family

and all the ways you have been let down or built up

washing the cloth of invincibility.

You’ll dream of long corridors searching for a baby

taken at birth to find she was never yours

and in the mirror no tragic victim looks back at you

no Cinderella or Joan of Arc.

Grief is not loss but inheritance, your fire,

your form. Grief is the callback to play yourself

with your sweat, your fear, challenged by desire

to answer the breaking Earth as though she were a heart

or some other organ, her blood rushing through

your own veins. As though you were yourself

a mind created to save her and after all these years

you learn the only thing you can be sure about

are the many opportunities you threw away.

There are no happy endings.

There is struggle. There is gratitude.

And there is silence.

(Infinite Power, Janet Vickers, Ekstasis 2016)