Ragged or Smooth

Jagged or Smooth

(“Why didn’t I die from the womb? Why didn’t I give up the spirit when my mother bore me?” Job 3:11)

I know the silence that is deafening,
I’ve heard it when noon feels like an encircling winter.
I’ve read the words supposed to revive me
but only fill my gut with sand.
I hear you, though you are not talking,
I’m waiting for the same things. I’m waiting
for the sanity to return.

If we could ration our days,
equal doses of pleasure and pain;
if we could only measure the darkness
to equal the bands of solar flares.
Why can’t we find the answers we
beg for? Why can’t the sunrise turn itself
around to bid us walk lightly again?

I know the pounding of unanswered mail,
I’ve heard the shrieks above stolen slumber.
I’ve read the language I inherited, I’ve translated
every word until I filled the afternoon with
thoughts captive behind the leaden bars of my brain.

I’ll write to you; I’ll talk with you. I’ll listen for
a thousand days. I’ve pounded on the granite walls
decades at a time. I know the hope that seems hollow,
the afternoons that drag on like mausoleums hidden behind
startled and painful sighs.

I haven’t forgotten the days when I would sacrifice everything
I coveted for a
tearful friend to carry my
baggage for a while. I will always sit next to the one who,
seeing my damage, does not stop to ask
at whose hand I hurt. (Though most times, I confess,
the hand was my own.)

I’ll never forget you, jagged or smooth. I’ll never regret
friendship that lasts from moon to constellations,
from mood to mood. I’ll never remove your name from
the portraits hanging from the hallways of my heart.