Paternoster


Paternoster

What is my world of pain?
Just thinking about it, riding round and round the Paternoster.
It is the pain of remembrance.
 
The feelings, the thoughts, the understanding
The knowing what I have felt has a word, a phrase.
Yet not having the language to express it.
 
Like Helen Keller with her hand in the water.
Letters, urgently, in rapid succession
written on the other hand.
W-A-T-E-R.
And through the fog bank of realization comes a reflection of a conception of what it is.
 
The experience is in my mind,
but to express the inner narrative, speak the words out loud…
I am not there yet.
 
I have a taxonomy of the words associated with that emotion listed in my innerness,
Someday soon I will speak the words out loud.
Bring innerness to birth.
 
This is the start.
Having the letters strung into words and phrases.
De-coded language of re-remembering this time last year.
 
Radiotherapy treatment.
Hoping, wishing to ring that shiny brass bell on the wall,
To signal the end of my own personal Chernobyl.
 
Images of the abandoned fun fair, the rotted library, disintegrated books.
The homes, glassless.
Verdant forests growing through floor and roof.
Everywhere a super abundance of nature,
and an underlying weirdness.
 
Thinking about my interrupted patterns of life, 
pushing the ornament in a crumbly painting
I pulled off the gessoed muslin
painted on the cracked surface.
 
My inner Chernobyl, my spiritual home,
my kin’s habitat, my affinity place.
Sister to mutant squirrels, cousins to altered deer.
With my cut and sewed breast and arm. Irradiated.
 
The world of pain is in my own mind
Trying to keep it on an even keel,
Being reminded at every turn
that I have been absent from life.
 
That I buried myself in an underground Anderson shelter.
In thick silence of days spent on my own,
Deep in myself, crying out in wonder.
 
Wrapping layers and amounts of thick duvets
and patchwork quilts around myself,
Bound with string, insulated from knives and needles.
 
One year distance, separating the old me from the new.
I am alive,
I am awake,
I shed my duvets
As the elevator doors open I step out naked into the fresh world 
into my new life.


 

 


 

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