Venom

Venom

Our third-born is angry at Adam and Eve for eating the apple.
I share his anger and hate the curse.
But the curse is everywhere,
It rules the world.
The venom permeates everything.

To see death is to know brokenness,
To know the curse.
I’m angry too!

The world is a tease.
So much beauty and life
Yet death rules the natural world.
I long for it to all be made new.

I can’t imagine what you lived with when
You were told your news.
The fear, the anxiety, the defeat.
I marvel at how you lived.

A bystander to your fight,
To your will to live,
To your torment.
It broke me to see you breaking.
It just didn’t seem right.

It still doesn’t seem right.
The anguish terrorizes my being,
It presses in
And mingles with the pain.
The venom seeps in.

Yet I stagger forward
Learning to process the poison,
To embrace its effects
And learn how to function again.

(Written Saturday, March 25 (day 102), the week the grief and stress caught up to me physically and I felt psychologically broken. Though past the 100 day mark, the pain and sadness still weighed heavily on me. And I was haunted by a recurring awareness of brokenness everywhere, particularly my own).