Wounds

Letter by letter, I hear the wounds echo,

Each tone rips me open, reverberating,

Each sound wave crashes against me, 

Revealing small tears in my unhealed past.

Places I believed I had walked through, 

Where reality shows me I was still frozen, 

Soul not yet ripened or willing to truly know, 

The kind of knowing by which shame is released.

Those parts of me recoil from the light, 

Sodden and heavy with false representation,

Of myself, of my beauty, of my lacking,

Of my ever lessening stain of self loathing.

Obsessive compulsion, to cleanse the soul,

Too fast, too often, too sterile, 

Unveiling an unattainable picture of what should have been,

What the soiled, sick nurture has said is so. 

Love is not sterile, nor is the truth,

Embracing, longing for what is raw real, 

Dirty, disheveled,  pride in reverse, 

Freedom, accompanying compliance with imperfection, 

Foreign feeling of radical, redeeming acceptance. 

Rejoicing in gifts of visceral, venerable pain, 

A novel conception of weathered old wounds, 

And the bitterness of unclenching a fist, 

Allowing recoil from familiar chaos,

Creating space between critical me and condemnation. 

Courage through the burgeoning unknown,

Uncovering the grace of surrender, 

Softening the nettling of new naked skin,

Skin that mends, not masks, magnificent echoing wounds. 

Megan Forrest

January 1, 2022