trauma – Jovis on a Journey…

She looks in the mirror and there she sees
All the hurt and the pain of her yesterdays
Yet the laughter too, and all of the joy
And she wistfully smiles in a way almost coy.

Life for her had never been terribly kind
Yet she still felt that it was a gift, in her mind
Her kindness a legend felt deeply by some
To others, never simply a wife or a mum.

She thought she could still feel the cuts of the knife
As she looked back, just this once over her life
She remembered what had had to be taken away
And the reasons though, why she was still here today.

And though she’d never felt the least singled out
She sometimes just wanted to scream and shout
Then she went to her sun-lounge where it was much warmer
And prepared yet again to face this new trauma.

The sound had gone right out of her days
It was the hardest thing she felt she could face
And try as she might to live with this…thing
She so missed the sound when the blackbirds all sing.

Some of us take such things for granted I know
Never imagining that it would ever just go
To see one you love in this now soundless state
Makes you graciously thankful it isn’t your fate.

One day…we hope.

©Joe Wilson – The sometimes unkind weave of life…2015

(This is very personal therapy, it is much more feelings, than quality.)

He was sent to Aldershot for training
He would learn how to kill or be killed
The training was all done with broomsticks
When he thought back it made his blood chill.

His unit was sent down to Portsmouth
To board a ship and go over there
It was packed to the gunwales with weapons
And the rations left no room to spare.

He practiced with his rifle on the journey
Like others who’d not held one before
He’d no sense of the horror he’d be facing
Nor the violence he’d always abhorred.

It was such a small piece of shrapnel
Caught both eyes as a shell case shattered
He never saw his two boys as they grew into men
Missing out on so much that had mattered.

His wife who he loved always helped him
And a life with new interests grew
He learnt how to read the braille papers
It pleased him he’d still know the news.

But the trauma from the experience scarred him
And ire with politics grew by the day
So he took to his new odd braille keyboard
And wrote articles and letters to complain.

He could sense the new way that the wind blew
In the corridors of power in the House
There was money to be made in new weapons
And politicians ignore those who grouse.

Then again two decades later it started
Another war that would mean more dead men
The obscenity rose like a bile in his throat
So once again he took to his ‘pen’.

©JRW2014

One in a group of poems recognising the centenary of WWI