David Smalling | + Follow Poet |
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I Speak of Pain

I speak of pain without external scars
I speak of loss for treasured things
I speak in the silence of my broken heart
The me I hold against all that tears it apart.
You think I am whole
Because I nurture everyone to be 
More than moon and drinker of the harsh indifferent sun
I teach them how to pull tides up
Change seasons, set the dark alight
Because wholesome deeds take not whole our strength
Or should I better say this another way
Pain is fuel in the fired clay

I speak of pain deflating dreams and self
I have pain for my brother and brethren gone
Meteorites of my unlit dawn
Nagging pebbles gnawing me in the shoe
Pearls I could have spent brimming my manliness

I speak of pain you cannot tell is there
Every death is hard to bare
But harder still my sibblings lost to me
In a fatherless world, without compass to maturity.

I speak of pain from ancient wars
My sisters were richest part of life
One place a whole cross on me, and I had to walk with it
It is so I love amidst the ebb and flow of adversity
I cannot wince, I am nailed to suffering's humility.

I speak of pain a million ways to feel
To dry a mother drenched in dreadful poverty
While ever drowned in sorrows tears
Amidst the frantic failures and fizzled repairs
The family like a shattered glass, that special souvenir
Becoming spites splints for bare susceptible feet
There is no pain deep as these
The magma boiling in the plugged up heart

I speak of pain from cruel loss
Friends fallowed into dry dead grass
Ambition like candle fat ground into the carpet clammy with dust
I speak of pain in love
Yet only once I love, and still no love its loyalty denied
When all the worldly value my peace could not abide
I suffer still and but to silence confide
The torture of my indomitable will, refusing death like a cup of gall
I speak of pain, the whole legacy of Adam's wounding fall

I make my rainbow with my tears
And turn the volume of my prayers up
To mute the scoffers, and the liars, and the jeers
I drink my joy from a promised cup
A wedding supper that challenges me with gender switching meanings
And yet I am secure
That nothing earthly may heal again my stagnant sore
I speak of pain I feel
From the hahazard day of grunting, groaning birth

Copyright © David Smalling | Year Posted 2012

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