It comes round again,
that moment when despair
stirs in your thoughts,
wraps its stony fingers
around your heart.
Begins in a droplet of disappointment
a growing flood,
finally a slough, a morass, still and dark.
The low point
where sorrow and discouragement
come to a searing, fetid pool.
All the injuries that throttled your soul,
the ones others gave you,
the ones you gave yourself,
begin a painful parade through memory
while the heart writhes.
And when the mind finally wears
through those black days,
Weariness drives you to emptiness and sleep,
knitting up the raveled sleeve of care.
Norm Baxter's poem speaks to something that so many of us are experiencing just now. This poem felt immediately recognizable the first time that I read it. I think that most of us know this, but I also think that we know it by feeling it first. The poem takes me from feeling to knowing to articulating something deep inside me. I hope that you will recognize something of your self in it as well.
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