This week’s post is a poem I wrote about the pain of broken community. Whether communion be broken by close friend, family member, or society person, we all can relate to one who feels hurt by (what she feels is) betrayal, who yet refuses to let go.
Lamentation
With jagged spoon, you gouged my aorta
quartered an important organ, slopped it on the sidewalk,
mortal, palpitating, hanging by shreds
leaving
part of me
dead
We are each other; I am you; you are me
Communal veins and arteries
Until
my silent pleas, my unheard cries
died on lips
skinned
with
brimstone
when I saw you
shunned.
The Ban is done.
Quivering at time’s grave,
my sulfur tears
pour for the light terror
that thrills you in its grand resolution
of dissociation
of the mystery of community,
where we sip each other’s blood.
So how could you break faith?
I am a woman because
your relieving amputation,
your cauterization,
your risky prevention,
is my suffering anguish.
I will forever agonize over the murdered Now
and hope for you
through quiet love you didn’t ask for.
You okay..?
Thanks for asking. Yes, I’m fine. Nevertheless, pains like these are real, and this week I was working at putting words to them. I think it’s so important to be able to lament. Sometimes in Christian societies, we don’t do “lament” very well, while non-Christian artists, it seems, deal exclusively with the human condition and our fallen world. For me, I want to be able to honestly express the lamentable parts of our experience. This time I wrote a very personal poem about what it can feel like when a close friend turns their back on God.