Paternoster Part 2

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, phrase.
Yet not quite 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.

Having the experience of that event in my mind,
to express the inner narrative,
speaking the words out loud,
I am not there yet.

I have a taxonomy of all the words associated with that emotion
Listed in my innerness,
Someday soon I will speak the spoken the words out loud,
Bring innerness to birth into the outside world.

This is the start.
Having the letters strung into words and phrases which make up the once secret,
Now 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 completion of my exposure to my own personal Chernobyl.

Images of my favourite fantasy haunts
Are the pages dedicated to photographs of Chernobyl now.

The abandoned fun fair,
The rotted library with disintegrated books and fallen in ceiling tiles,
The homes, glassless, verdant forests growing through floor and roof
And everywhere super abundance of nature,
And an underlying disturbing weirdness.

Thinking about the interrupted patterns
Of life
and how to interrupt them and push the ornament,
in a crumbly version I pulled off the gessoed muslin and then painted on the cracked and flaked bit,
I kind of went with my inner
Chernobyl – my spiritual home, my kin’s home, 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 in 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 blood, tumours, injections and knives.
Radioactive infusions, stitches and needles,
Waking up on a trolley throwing up.

This is my world of pain, that I shy away from and wad myself up against.
I guess going up in a lift is moving from the pain
and moving on up
Moving on out
Moving away from,
Moving through.

One year distance,
Separating the old me from the new.
I am alive,
I am awake,
I shed my duvets and walk naked into the fresh world

As the elevator doors open and I step out into my new life.

image: Tree in hotelroom in Prypjat, Chernobyl, Ukraine; https://www.pinterest.co.uk/pin/388013324137577619/

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