Racing, Resting, Rising
An imperfect poem as a permission slip
Friends, what can be said to ease the ache so many of us feel in this moment? I have been wrestling with words for the last day and a half, feeling a pull to say something, anything, that would somehow feel like balm for a heart on fire. I haven’t surfaced anything that hasn’t be said or shouted already.
Anger, grief, numbness, and sensations that I don’t have language for have arisen like an army in my chest. When it comes to putting these embodied experiences into neat sentences, I fumble. When I fear I might be simply adding to the noise that claws at your last shreds of peace today, I pause. Yet the pull remains. The tug of war continues. And on and on.
There have been so many gorgeous poems shared this week from many of my favorite writers, past and present, that each speak thru a different lens: rage, compassion, fear, tenderness. Like a kaleidoscope, all illuminate some part of us that needs to be seen and felt. All are valid and needed and useful. Check in with yourself: What space are you crying out from right now?
Despite this soup of feelings and fears sloshing around - or, perhaps because of it - I am showing up here today with a poem, and not because I think poetry can stitch together the wound we are trying so hard to tend to in this moment. I’m taking up my (digital) pen because poetry is the language that I tend to speak when small talk feels futile, when I feel myself start to slip beneath the surface of all that can be articulated with facts, and when I sense that I am both massive and miniscule in the same breath.
All week, I’ve felt desperate for someone to let me know that the way I am feeling is real and worthy of taking up space. That it’s safe to share aloud. Luckily, I’ve gotten to share private space with many people who have offered me this gift - but the feeling of needing permission to be seen and heard in a larger arena remains.
In the current kaleidoscope, I am clicking through anger in this moment. Pieces of all that enrages me about this week’s election clink against and tumble over shards of furies long past. Old and new mingle together and I am holding them all carefully. I don’t want to hurt myself in the holding, but won’t be bullied into putting them down before I’ve tended to them well.
Anger is often an emotion that hides sadness, shame, and fear underneath, and while I will spend time with those feelings in good time, I am making sure not to fast forward through the anger. Pushing it away only intensifies the burn. Pushing it down only allows it to bubble up in the future and hurt ourselves and others. Only by spending time with it, taking care of it, will anger reveal different angles and doorways through which to walk forward into hope.
However Bad the Sin, a poem from Take Me to the Thin Places, isn’t about politicians or elections specifically, but for me, was a creative exercise in feeling my way through anger in a way that felt healing. In hopes of reminding myself that I have the ability (as do you) of sitting with red hot rage and allowing it to transform into grace, compassion, and action, I am revisiting this poem. I am open to what it might have to teach me right now.
Born from my personal, specific experience of being a young woman in an organized religion, I wrote this poem specifically to explore how messages both straightforward and subtle reinforced the belief that to be a woman in the church was to be a second class citizen. I felt confused and hurt about the different privileges that men enjoyed in my faith community, but also pressure to keep my feelings to myself, as sharing them didn’t feel encouraged or welcome. Why weren’t the women - strong and kind and capable - allowed to serve in the church? Why weren’t the women that I knew and loved not trusted with the opportunity to care for our faith family, as they cared so carefully for their own families? How was it that women, capable of creating new life, not offered a place in the future?
I stress that this is my personal, specific experience because I’m not here to tell you how to feel about or relate to organized religion - which for me, is wildly different than my spiritual practice - but rather to continue to wrestle with what it means to live through a confusing and frightening time and trust yourself to tell the truth about it, whatever that might sound like for you, whenever you feel safe enough to utter it. I believe that if we can tell the truth, we are empowered. And if we can rediscover the power we have always had, we have a way forward.
I hope these words, even if they represent an experience different from your own, allow you to glimpse spaces in your own life where others may have tried to make you feel small and shamed and silent. I hope this poem allows you to begin to see that you are worthy, sacred, and more powerful than you can imagine, no matter the words or actions of others whose fear of your power has caused them to lock the doors of their mind and heart. I hope this reflection helps you to feel less alone and build solidarity in community with others, as we support one another to, before racing ahead, feel what we feel.
We will not race ahead, but rest assured: we will rise.
However Bad the Sin
Tell him what you’ve done wrong.
Don’t be afraid.
Do what he tells you.
The first and only time I smeared the truth
across my mouth
to make it tasty enough for your glutinous ears
I almost choked.
Stiff with white lace
not yet nine
resigned to reconciliation,
I understood what it meant to spill my secrets
while wishing they could be all mine for all time
wondering why I would only be worthy of looking in the eye
of being held
after the thoughts and deeds and feelings
filthy enough to stain all that was clean -
were cut from me
like a cancer.
The stretch of years when I was invited to knead my shame
into bread
sweet enough for you to eat,
your tongue, big and dark.
I won’t surrender a crumb to you.
I have never been the saint people prayed I would be.
I will not be the idol
you worship
to keep your own follies
tightly wrapped
like relics
in the forbidden recesses of your parsonage.
The last and final time I was invited to crush my peace
into wine
dark enough to get you drunk on all you say you know,
I was supposed to admit all the ways
I wasn’t worthy of love
I could not bring myself to hide behind the screen
accept the sickness
you insisted ailed me
even as I breathed easier than ever before.
I am Lazarus, risen. I won’t lie back down.
I haven’t visited since
but God can rest easy,
for others have taken up the task
of impressing the importance
of pressing confessions from my lips -
so well, in fact,
that they soon could retire,
for I became my own pontiff
with no need for anyone camouflaged in cloaks
to tear me open
tacking up all the red, raw pieces of me
for all to see and feast upon,
torture me with notions
of the Monster I was made to fear I am.
I’ll run from her no more.
I will seek her out.
And when I find myself in the forest,
padding quietly beside that unnamable wildness,
pulsing with life that will not be confessed or pressed,
I will know She agrees.
I am Lazarus, risen. Let’s away.
A poem is so seemingly small in the face of hot tears and power hungry people, who are hell bent on telling me, a woman, who I can be and what I can speak aloud and think and read and create and earn and aspire to.
Verses feel vain if they insist on serving as a simple spell to shatter the ceilings that we find are still forcing us to stoop down and squat in the margins.
I’m not claiming to be capable of magic. Yet, what if….?
I’m still feeling out whether or not words will stoke the fire, and if it’s necessarily wrong to let it burn. Perhaps, instead of consenting to have cold water douse the lives we have worked so hard to carve out of a landscape of systematic injustice, it’s healthy to let the heat come; anger can be a portal to parsing through all the pain we feel, and eventually - I hope - pointing us towards a wide open space where we can plant a new path.
May we give ourselves permission to feel whatever arises.
May we have the courage to not surrender ourselves to outside forces who would refuse to recognize how holy we are, just as we are.
May we remember the duty of care we have to ourselves and to each other to build loving spaces where all are safe, nourished, and happy.
We will not race ahead, but rest assured: we will rise.