Kate Meyer-Currey - One Poem

Hammered

 

Burdens borne are slow to lift

their weighted pall of resigned

acceptance that settles over

your bowed shoulders heavy

head wearied bones after the

struggling days of realization

grappling with bruising reality

that makes your face sag as

your skull grins boldly at the

world with its game face on

while your teeth chatter as

they utter platitudes of hope

and adjustment that fool no

one not even yourself for you

grit them as you bite the hand

of fate and that is how days

pass dreading what comes

next better you think to guess

there is worse to come for then

this will seem pleasant by the

laws of comparison so your

taut skin will not flinch under

scalpel blades that excise

your old self so you smile at

your scars and death will one

day be just an anesthetic

to knock out pain of days

spent dreading more of the

same so you barely notice at

first the shifting of the light

into a slow dawning of hope

as night’s bruise fades and

nightmare’s stitches dissolve

into the itch of routine as you

adjust to survival after the

strip-lit hell-glare of danger

and sense fear’s absence

in the night sky overhead

where stars no longer signal

splintered warnings from

their fractured shards but

reform familiar constellations

as your shattered self renews

its wholeness and refracts

their steady scintillating gaze

 

 

Kate Meyer-Currey lives in Devon. A varied career in frontline settings has fueled her interest in gritty urbanism, contrasted with a rural upbringing, often with a slipstream twist. Since September 2020 she has had over a hundred poems published in print and online journals, both in the UK and internationally. Her chapbooks ‘County Lines’ (Dancing Girl Press) and 'Cuckoo’s Nest’ (Contraband Books) are due out in early 2022.