Bearing the Cuts

This time of year you can find the windows through the thorns.
There is no green to cover the openings and if you are brave
you can carefully push aside the brambles and look in,
see what is left of a household abandoned generations ago.
A few pieces of furniture, dried and fragile, the paint barely left
on spindles and table tips. A odd piece of crockery,
The things left behind, of so little value they were not worth taking.

You have a weakness for such things, the broken and abandoned.
They remind you of times in your own life, left behind, ignored,
no longer mattering enough to care for or carry along
on someone else’s journey, forced to find your own.

You did of course. Step by wretched broken step,
finding yourself in the darkness of an enternal February,
cutting yourself on briars as you climbed out of rotted windows
into a new world of fields and sunlinght, finding new seasons
you had almost forgotten.

Almost, but not quite. Never quite. A hope without evidence
spurring to bear the cuts, aware that the way to the other side of pain
is through it, willing to bleed in order to heal. It was woth it.
And now you are on the outside, looking in. A new place for you,
one that has left you with a hatred for briars,

You are still unsure of their purpose,
and you have made it your life’s purpose to cut them away,
to make the path to light less painful,
to fix the broken things with little more than will
and memory.

Sometimes, that is enough.

About this poem

The picture was taken at an abandoned farm not far from my house. The poem is about that place, about broken things and restoration and gratitude. Or, if you found an different meaning, about your meaning. The reader is always right.

Tom