The Breakthrough by Donna Bolam
You plan the journey and study the maps,
You speak to experts and check your bootstraps,
You pack your bags and predict the weather,
To ensure that you keep it together.
But there’s no preparation like being on the terrain,
Where the wind is erratic and the landscape, inhumane,
The darkness disorientates and knocks you from your route;
Where directions get disrupted and your instincts go mute.
But even this uncertainty can be prepared for,
You can take the diversions as chances to explore.
Inner storms, however, disrupt at deeper levels
Your secure sanctum is inhabited by devils.
…
I scream my stomach into my mouth
And sting my eyes with salted tears.
The breath I pleaded to give her
Is lost in my throat and suffocates.
The pressure in my skull, a form of comfort,
The searing pain, a distraction from the ceaseless desert inside.
All the platitudes and clichés gives a stab of selfish temptation,
They solicit me to lose myself into the solitary abyss.
“Leave me alone!”
“I can’t give you the words you don’t know how to say!
I don’t have them, so stop silently insinuating I am secreting them!”
“This pain is unique and you will never know!”
…
Your pain may be particular but never unique,
Share your pain because it’s pain and it makes us all weak.
My child, help is at hand if you have the eyes to look,
My son came to find you when you felt your most forsook.
And my son knows this country well for he has journeyed through.
Made this inner wilderness a home and shares it with you.
He conquered that controlling demon, that herald of death;
He fought him with everything even to his dying breath.
The path may be fearful but you can pass,
There may be darkness but it will not last.
The wind rages, bites but there will be peace.
Here can be a place where your strivings cease.
Written Sunday 8th July 2018 two days after my wife died.