For Justina

A Poem

I watched the world, finding often, and everywhere;

Disillusionment, greed, anger, cruelty, grief and pain,

though I as yet knew no such names for these disturbances,

like stormy days, almost personal, frighteningly unknown.

In the early days of second grade
I felt my teacher seemed unwell
and told her so and asked her why. 
I rose from the floor, lifted,
one of her hands twined in my hair,
struck dumb by shock.

I talked to my parents who made no response

as if I was a skip in the record our antique Victrola played,
something essential to ignore if harmony is to remain unbroken.
My shock, that someone wanted to hurt me at all,

on purpose was then yet harder to grasp.

Later days brought a smile on the face of a, somehow, victor. 

Why, of what, for what, why choose me, and

how is it possibly good to you

to paint my pain on my face, 

smiling then, as if to teach me
only the strongest were artistic enough to do that.

I tried disgust with myself,

too weak, to ugly,  unruly hair, skinny legs,
you know the endless ways to distort your reflection

as if it explained, or justified.
Trying to find and heal my invisible offense,

so much less frightening than discovering

how much more they reflected the world than any like I. 

They were there, filling the circles,

as I moved outward from my beginning.

Like a pebble searching for the last farthest ripple of its impact,
looking for meaning.


Who had the answer or the strength to talk with me about these things?

The principle, running from his office,
screaming,  "you can't talk to me this way, I'm not your father",
when I asked for help, dealing with a teacher

who asked me to touch him, to hurt him, unsure

for he I would not abandon, with whom I could not comply.

I felt the sickness' twisted ways, but had no help to offer,

to soften, what was by absence or incapacitation,
The dying strangled cry of another
or perhaps two fathers lost.

It was years before I understood why he ran while I remained, 

temporary occupant of his office, somehow,
the only  principal available.

I spent my time watching for answers, 

singing to the creator while walking empty streets at 3am.
Hoping for an answer from whatever might hear me.
My persistent, heartfelt endless song,

Soothed anguish  into new hope by starlight and solitude.

Later, there was an answer,
years long, beyond words or telling.
But only after I found a killer hiding within me.
So terrifying in outrage that no one withstood him. 
I was disappointed to find my courage comprised only,

 of outrage so complete, that no fear found room within me.

No one ever learned he would not harm or kill,
knowing how impossible it was;  That violence would unmake me,
that any pain I brought could only be, first and most painfully mine,
striking at the center of, the very thing that I was born to be.
Somehow certain to take from me what no other's violence could.

Even my angry words demanded increasingly to be spoken,

from grief, in  vulnerability, without pride or shame.
Such is the cost, and reward of power.

The answer stretched and stretches on,

a thousand thousand pages long.
But this is far enough to go today.
Your gift from me beyond mere hope

 Is something I heard my heart say.

Whose heart is this, so tender and so true,

that it can be broken,
and being broken love the love
that made it's breaking possible;  perhaps essential.
Finding finally joy and beauty enough

in it's own tenderness and in laughing tears,

the strength for so many tomorrow's.