Deep and Wide

Shallow has never described her.

She prefers a free-fall to

Wading hesitantly, 

feeling every icy drop of pain.

A deeply devoted mother,

She scans the horizon of her life

When the waters are still.

She searches for the treasures of her heart

buried in a sea of chaos

Unearthed now in the calm.

The sight of them bobbing and floating 

Rhythmically in the flow of her love

Causes her to forget the storm.

What she'll remember most is...now.

In the quiet she drifts

on the love she feels for them.

A love so deep she will hold her breath 

And dive down into it again and again,

When the winds change and the storms rage.

Casting aside the pain in her dissent,

Retrieving her sinking heart

As she retrieves her treasures

And once again they will float.

A Disturbing Experience

I sit in fear.

The ache within me spreading like cancer.

My world is not turning,

it's too scared to.

I see the words scrawled 

on me like the disease I wear.

In naming my disease, he named me.

And I believed him.

Where does my strength come from

when I force myself to face this?

To accept it like a case of chicken-pox,

though it will never go away.

Acceptance makes the pain lessen like the grip of a headache.

I smile and play and tear my new birthday dress on the slide.

But as I sit alone on a teeter-totter my disease flares

and I sink into it like a coma.

I cannot face it, or bare it, or accept it, or even scream out for help.

I'm cast in fear and I wear silence like a surgeon's mask to protect myself,

and my family too.

They don't know about my disease, and I can't risk telling them.

Behind my mask I play.

I hold my mother's dog up to the window when my mother isn't home.

I wait for the little dog to whine and shake as she searches the yard below for my mother.

Then I hold her tight and whisper soothingly in her tiny soft ear.

The pounding of her heart against my hand

slows down, mine does too

And we both stop trembling in my embrace.

We're like victims of a house fire clinging to each other on the ledge of a window.

My tormenter is not my disease.

He is the one who named it, named me,

When he misdiagnosed my freckles as cooties

And I was slain by a six year old.