The Cry of the Unattended

I started my weekly writing group last Monday and I decided I would in some part concentrate on rhyming poetry. I have a history about that: a few years ago I was accepted into a rather prestigious poetry conference (prestigious to me, anyway) and it did not go well, especially my poems that rhymed. Rhyming is apparently passe in the world of esteemed poetry. I left the conference with weakened confidence, even though on the last night I boldly read ONLY my 'passe' poems and I chuckled at the funny ones, along with everyone else.

Dr. Seuss and me. I'm not giving up.

The poem I wrote on Monday night is not funny, but it is hopeful. It was inspired by one of my clients who had a horrific horrific childhood. Sometimes I have to tell her I've heard enough: the details from her sociopathic mother are too hard to absorb sometimes.

Last week she insightfully told me, "kj, I would have had a normal life. It's not fair, I'm mentally ill but it's not my fault. I got robbed of being okay."

Many of my clients struggle with childhood trauma: abuse, neglect, abandonment. Some understand instantly and some look perplexed when I ask about their little girl, or little boy still inside them, the scared child who still hopes to be loved and cared for. We begin a process of mothering that child, of finding safe places, or providing parental care to one's self.

So this is some of this history of this here poem. xo

The child was ten
When she learned how to fend
Its’a story that’s ripe for the asking
She hid under her bed
Not a breath was then said
Til she knew that she knew about fasting

The tale started one June
With a darkening moon
In a house where whispers could shout
In her crib by the wall
With a murmur she’d call
Even then when the lights would go out.

Now don’t go to thinking
This child was sinking
Before she had learned how to speak
Because even at two
She knew who was who
And she knew that she knew how to seek

She was four when a marker
Made her coloring darker
And she learned how to read special signs
She knew when to hide, when to laugh, when to try
She learned how to fly
And she mastered genetic design

She’d lie under a tree,
Learning just how to be
Came as easy as eating a pear
She’d be white, she’d go black
Slide down a glass track
And in time She’d be here, she’d be there

When the child began
Her adult master plan
By then she expected the least
She had tried once or twice
To choose tough over nice
But she never could tame the old beast.

It would come in her dreams
A voice without seems
That hand that withheld what it could
She never gave up
Put her faith in a cup
Walked ahead as much as she could

The ghosts from back then
Wouldn’t budge in the end
She would holler and push them asunder
But they just kept returning
Her memories burning
Until on day she froze out the thunder

It’s a scared little girl
Who dances and twirls
It’s the child who parents her kin
She had learned how to give
How to hope, how to live
But not from the core of within

So one day she stood
On a terrace of wood
Raised her arms up high in the air
She murmured her name
Put aside all her shame
And she knew that she knew the right care.

love kj