In Praise of Pain


The red-gold flashes of outraged nerves
threw open my mind to the slow world,
the real world of each reluctant awakening,
of daily life unfolding, to the tissue-paper pink
of the early Mexican evening primrose.
To the unbearable faith of butterfly
wings lifting, to the warm earth smell
under freshly mowed grass,
and pheasants cackling two fields over.
To worms burrowing, fish
leaping in snow melt, white-rippled.
To birds carrying wisps of straw
to weave their treetop cradles.
If endurance of the unthinkable
is the heavy price exacted,
sharpened focus
is the unmeasurable gift.

(Published in Kota Press Poetry Journal, 2003)




Choices


Colón, Panama: the armpit of the world,
you assure me in scribbled notes
you send from your tied-up boat. Day by day
you grow weaker in your self-imposed solitude.
The mahogany decks you scraped,
sanded and varnished, then
scraped, sanded and varnished
all over again. The brass rails
throwing the tropical sun back in its face.
The galley you fitted out with real crystal
safe behind brackets, china a newlywed
would covet for her first home.
You, who sailed the world’s seas,
now moored to a dock trapping unwary feet
in its rot, air thick with the stink
of decayed fish and vomit, on a harbor
you pray you never fall into.

You tried it here, saw the doctors, held down
a job that streaked your eyes red then fled
back to your dream in southern waters. Somehow,
amid that sun-blistered deck, the sails striped
with mold and torn, the finger-smeared brass,
you see coconut palms bending over a beach,
the sparkle of shells, mermaids swift
in a clear blue-green sea. You sip rum
from chipped crystal, tune out
the curses, hear trade winds instead, regard
skinny toes turning blue below wasted legs.
Your long sigh—broken by cancer-cough—
from a deep well of contentment
reaches me, still not understanding,
here at home.

(Published in Bay Area Poets Coalition Anthology 23, 2002)


Patricia Wellingham-Jones has a longtime interest in 'healing writing' and the benefits people gain from writing and reading their work together. Widely published, her chapbooks include Don’t Turn Away: Poems About Breast Cancer, Voices on the Land, and End-Cycle, poems about caregiving.