Monday, December 12, 2005

Pesha Gertler's Healing Time, trigger poem, Cancer Lifeline, Week of Dec. 12 '05

The Healing Time

Finally on my way to yes
I bump into
all the places
where I said no
to my life
all the untended wounds
the red and purple scars
those hieroglyphs of pain
carved into my skin, my bones,
those coded messages
that send me down
the wrong street
again and again
where I find them
the old wounds
the old misdirections
and I lift them
one by one
close to my heart
and I say holy
holy.
- Pesha Gertler

Copyright by Pesha Gertler

3 comments:

My Daily Struggles said...

I often find my self speaking of myself in the the third-person when I speak of past wounds. If I speak of myself in the third-person, well, that is because an account of my intrusion into this valley of suffering forces one, like Dorian Gray, to confront his own "devilish, furtive, ingrown" self-portrait. The pronoun he gives a blessed bit of distance between myself and a too fresh ordeal in which the use of I would be rather like picking off a scab only to find that the wound had not completely healed.

Anonymous said...

I agree that wnen the wounds are still raw, third person enables the poet to enter an otherwise too-painful landscape.

However, I have also found the reverse to be true. After a certain time of healing has passed, I often find that I need to speak in my first person voice, in order to be fully present in the poem.

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