Pain

Pain

She is an atlas of pain
Territories of loss
Pattern her.

Every country in her mind
Tainted by memory
Complicated by desire.

From this inchoate knot
She shapes self,
Finds a thread from within the tangled skein
Bites it off, breaks it.

She has to walk away
From what bound her to him.
The promise of what never came
The pushing-away.

She placates the child screaming her father’s name,
trawls through her dreams,
for markers and signs
for clues of where to go next.

Birds swoop around her house
That waits in the dark like a stranger
Calling with wild hoarse voices
Their shadows find their fleeting way onto her page.

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