I want to know what causes this pain.
Not just the ache we all eventually have
in the shell of our muscle and bone. Not
the staring after someone has barged into
our body, leaving us more alone, nor
the breaking apart of what we believed
was ourself, or the pills or prayers we accept
afterwards to make it go away. No, more so,
I want to get to the bottom of it, to know
the reason the raven will kill for its mate
and never feel badly after, why fish don’t
appear to cry when their babies are lost,
what is behind the hurt that any breathing
being brings upon another. And do not
tell me it is because they don’t know
a special kind of god, or that they strayed
from a woodland path we memorized long ago
as children, walking it so often, we did it
with our eyes closed, cut off from the blue jay
knocking a robin’s egg out of the nest, the father’s
thumbprints on our friend’s young thigh, the toxic
liquid from lead and steel, and the noxious gas we
call just another war, every atrocity that overtakes
us from our own refusal to get any better.
I want to know where that comes from, why
we trod upon one another’s heart, reseed it,
then claim we are growing a garden—as if
anything can grow once blood has seeped
into the soil, as if our planet, in its own pain,
can absorb it all, each of us guilty of our own
slaughter, our own kind of grief giving. And while
I realize the sun also rises, I wonder sometimes
if it does so just out of spite for the moon,
out of habit, night taking over day and day over night,
the daily struggle of trying to outlive one another,
until, as they say, this too shall pass, we all shall
pass, return to the energy we were before we
became so insecurely human, so terribly
veined with death that we ourselves inflict it.
Katherine Mercurio Gotthardt, copyright May 14, 2024, all rights reserved
Posted in Katherine's Coffeehouse
