Pain

Deanna Selinger



Pain
(a sestina)

Silent it entered, unnoticed at first,
stealing into my being, a phantom of light.
But shifted then into many unfamiliar shades of night
and then into obscurity, melting my will
into a simmering fusion of undistinguishable pain.
It hurts here. It hurts there. It hurts everywhere.

Relentless, unrelievable. Yes, I wear
a mask of complacency. I’ll be the first
to admit it has mastered me, my Beautiful Pain.
It shadows the dark, it shadows the light.
It grows into monsters. It has its own will.
It wakes me with fierce possession at 3 a.m. every single night.

But never I cry, not even in the stillness of night.
Instead I whisper, God why, how, where
and when shall I muster the strength to will
myself well? I must be the absolute first
in all of creation to whither from darkness in full sunlight!
So what, I pray, is the ointment to soothe such pain?

Spidering through my fingers, my pain
slithers up my spine. Sleepless at night
it clutches my sanity and crushes every atom of evanescent light.
It plays with my overburdened senses and teases me where
it hurts me the most, where it taunted me first –
“Thy Will Be Done, Thy Will, Thy will, thy will…”


Now I smile, I laugh at my disappearing will.
Oh, given a choice of course, I’d poof away the pain.
But no magic Merlin comes to me. At first,
when I was young I used to chant away the night
with the biblical ghosts of godness who jeered everywhere,
“My yoke is easy, My burden is light…”

My yoke is easy, my burden is light?
I can’t quite recall who said that now. So I will
clothe myself in apathy. This I wear
proudly, with my banner of undeniable pain.
Enigmatic existence by day, pseudo slumber by night,
I and my Beloved, Omega and Alpha, the Last and the First.

And so, with dogged will, I caress my eager pain.
I mold it from earth into stonewhere long into the night.
And I become the first to discover my own hidden light.