It Wasn't Over When You Died

 

IT WASN'T OVER WHEN YOU DIED

A poem about how child abuse can be passed on through generations:

 

It wasn't over when you died,
When I was still too young to know
The damage that you did inside,
The pain that I would undergo.

When I was still too young to know,
You did to me what things you would.
The pain that I would undergo
Came later, once I understood.

You did to me what things you would
While I lay numb and still. The hate
Came later, once I understood
The sorrow that you came to sate.

While I lay numb and still, the hate
Arose in you as love, as need.
The sorrow that you came to sate
Then passed between us in your seed.

Arose in you as love, as need
To undergo yourself in me,
Then passed between us in your seed,
Became your lasting legacy.

To undergo yourself in me,
The damage that you did inside
Became your lasting legacy.
It wasn't over when you died.

© by Nicholas Gordon

 

Audio and Video Music: Journeyman. By Aakash Gandhi. Music free to use at YouTube. Illustration Credit: AI

 

To see this poem on my site, go to https://www.poemsforfree.com/itwasn.html. For more poems about child abuse, go to https://www.poemsforfree.com/childabusepoems.html .

Adelaide Is Gracious to a Fault

 A name poem for Adelaide about an abused child who grows up with an exaggerated fear of conflict:

 

Adelaide is gracious to a fault,
Desiring harmony more than she does desire.
Each disagreement threatens to turn dire.
Likes and dislikes never leave the vault.
A child of war becomes adept at peace.
Intuitively she skirts the hidden mines,
Determined not to cross long-vanished lines,
Eluding rage long after rage has ceased.

 

© by Nicholas Gordon

 

Audio and Video Music: A Kiss for Amanda. By DJ Williams. Music free to use at YouTube. Photo Credit: AI.

 

To see this poem on my site, go to https://www.poemsforfree.com/adelai.html. For more name poems, go to https://www.poemsforfree.com/namepoems.html .

Movement Comes Most Often Without Motion

 

A psychological poem about unconscious change:

 

Movement comes most often without motion.
Incremental thaws can peel a rock.
Years wash away the stubbornest emotion,
While silence can the rustiest thought unlock.
There are magic whispers quietly in mourning
That soothe what we will never know as pain,
And songs that come upon us without warning,
Undoing all the buttons that remain.
Our skin is quite a permeable border
Across which strangers freely come and go,
Subversive to our phantom sense of order
Yet never touching what we think we know.
Thus without motion do we silent move
Unknowing, until suddenly we love.

 

© by Nicholas Gordon

 

Audio and Video Music: Arms of Heaven. By Aakash Gandhi. Music free to use at YouTube. Illustration Credit: AI.

 

To see this poem on my site, go to https://www.poemsforfree.com/motion.html. For more psychological poems, go to https://www.poemsforfree.com/psychologicalpoems.html .

Mai Is Well Aware She Is the Future

 

A psychological poem for Mai about how her identity is shaped by her generation:

 

Mai is well aware she is the future

And much depends upon who she becomes.

If someone took her generation's picture,

Mai knows its beauty would be everyone's.

One is rooted deeply in one's time,

New source of seed and leafmeal for the soil,

The graceful iteration of a rhyme,

Equally a prototype and foil.

Clearly, what each does induces all

Alike to turn, to model, and to change.

Remember that as one we rise and fall,

Lest pride our hearts from our shared selves estrange.

Our choices, all of them, confused or clear,

Sustain a common moral ecosphere.

 

© by Nicholas Gordon

 

Audio and Video Music: No.1 A Minor Waltz. By Esther Abrami. Music free to use at YouTube. Illustration Credit: AI

 

To see this poem on my site, go to https://www.poemsforfree.com/mai.html. For more psychological poems, go to https://www.poemsforfree.com/psychologicalpoems.html .

Seventy-Three Suspends Her Animation

Dear Reader,

I have decided to resurrect my former blog, Poem of the Day, as Poem of the Week, publishing each week a different poem from my website, Poems for Free (https://www.poemsforfree.com).

This week, the Poem of the Week is a number poem for a woman who both embraces her feminine role and at the same time dreams of one less self-sacrificing:

Seventy-three suspends her animation,
Eloping for a moment with a dream,
Vividly devouring each sensation,
Each image that means more than it can mean.
Nor can her love reality redeem.
Time moves on, and she comes back to life,
Yearning for the woman in the wife.

The love of husband, children, grandchildren,
Has been a garden long and faithfully tended,
Resulting in a peaceful, well-earned beauty,
Enduring pleasure she would not want ended,
Embrace she chooses out of more than duty.

© by Nicholas Gordon

 

To see this poem on my site, go to https://www.poemsforfree.com/73susp.html. For more poems about feminism, go to https://www.poemsforfree.com/feminismpoems.html .

Poem of the Week

March 29, 2012 #678

Dear Subscriber:

This week’s poem of the week is a psychological poem.

You can hear me read the poem and listen to the music for it at my site by going to http://www.poemsforfree.com/week.html .

Yours,

Nick Gordon

I NEED TO TALK TO YOU

PARENTS:

I need to talk to you, my dear,
Of many, many things:
Of what I wish and what I dream
And what my silence sings;

Of all the things I want for you
And all the things I fear,
And all the things I try to say
But never can make clear.

I wish that you could know me, yet
I'm glad that you do not.
Sometimes I see in you the unformed
Person I forgot.

I wish I could protect you
From all that conquered me,
And make of you a mirror of
The self I could not be.

CHILDREN:

I need to talk to you, right now!
I've got a lot to say
About the way you handle me
And why I act this way.

I know you love me, though sometimes
Your anger's all I see.
But if I do just what you want,
Then I'll be you, not me.

I need to get you off my back
And also have you near.
I need to learn the limits of
My courage and my fear.

I need to ramble on my own
And sometimes, yes, get lost,
And touch the heart of ecstasy
Regardless of the cost.

GRANDPARENTS:

I need to talk to all of you,
I am so much alone.
I hope that you can spare for me
Five minutes on the phone.

My life was once so full of life,
So packed with toil and love.
Now it's full of memories
That dance but do not move.

You do not know me really now --
To you I'm mainly old,
Befuddled, frail, incompetent,
A child you have to scold.

But inside I'm still mainly me,
The one who made you, you,
Now a husk without a seed
And little left to do.

ALL:

I need to talk to you, I need
All of you to know
The me I think of as myself,
The me I rarely show.

By those I love the most, I find
That I'm most often seen
Through acts I would undo and words
I do not really mean.

I need to tell you everything
That bursts within my heart,
Simply, just the way it is,
With neither craft nor art.

I need you all to see me
With love and sympathy,
And so I need to talk to you --
You need to talk to me?

© by Nicholas Gordon