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Poet’s Corner is an organic grouping of ISSTD members who share with each other poems that they have created, and which frequently encompass themes related to member’s work as trauma-informed therapists. On occasions the group come together for online recitals to share such productions with the wider ISSTD community. These poems then become available for further sharing, via our ISSTD News.
In October we shared with you some poetry from the ISSTD’s virtual conference which was held on the 22-23 October.
Once again, this month we bring you some more of the poetry that was performed at the Conference as part of the social program.
Poet’s Corner welcomes any ISSTD poet. It is a small, warm and supportive group. We hope all budding and experienced poets alike join up. Just send Valerie Sinason an email at vsinason@aol.com.
TURNING POINT
By Joan Turkus
Psychotherapy, two souls in the room
Heads bent over
Struggling to listen with ears wide open
Hours of spilling stinging tears
Angry red splotches of blackened shame on the floor
The mocking calligraphy on the wall
“In the midst of winter, there is an invincible summer” (Camus)
Waiting, secretly wondering
Whether the deep gray sky will lighten
Will the bright yellow forsythia bloom
Against the bleak landscape
Then, surprisingly, suddenly appearing
A simple line, “He never touched my soul”
The turning point announces itself!
Calling a joyous welcome to the human community
The shimmering promise of summer floats in the air
BIRTHING
By George Halasz
not yet knowing where your body ends
and mine begins, I need your play
to make amends
to re-pair our self-fractured dividends
again, I listen to your curative narrative
I insert myself between your gestured silence to relive shared stresses, endless violence within and without,
we’re urgently buffeted between unspoken sensations
or floundering in each other’s treacherous privations eventually we emerge
stripped of sanity’s sterile veneer
long-forgotten vanishing points, shocking, reappeared precisely there, where long ago, you and I disappeared
where your body ends and mine begins
robbed of vitality, maligned, yet innocent of sins our subjectivity remains unsigned
beyond our body, beyond our mind
THE NORTH MEDICINE MEN CLAN
By Colin Ross
The north medicine men clan: to get in
You need not be pure nor free of guilt, sin
Or all that baggage other creeds carry
For life with pride in fact which they marry
For life. To join this clan you have to know
The way that living energy will flow
Flow free in rock in tree and in the sky
And learn that well that truth before you die.
The clan will let you in in life not death
While life is flowing in your lungs’ living breath.
They don’t hold meetings, keep minutes, charge fees
Or do those things that other churches do or freeze
Your assets in a tithe, no, none of that.
Tuned in on the granite on which I sat
There in the woods the home of birds, creatures
On foot with fur, and moss, lichen, features
Of that landscape, I joined but paid no fee
And thereby set my living spirit free.