(Violations of spiritual law can only be corrected when you learn to feel the hurts you have inflicted and still inflict without feeling worthless, without crumbling under a load of guilt)


Guilt, pain and beauty

I do not deny that guilt plays a role
when I look at her deformed
feet, her curled up chubby toes
shaped like one of those tiny
Chinese feet in old times, then
meaning beauty and a women
bound to please her lover,
and I am not there to tend to her needs.

I do not deny that beauty still plays
a part in how, at 86, she carefully paints
her eyebrows with her black pencil and dusts
blusher across her wrinkled cheeks,
how, each morning she meticulously
applies lipstick and gloss to her thin flabby lips,
and how she paints over the pain of old age.

I do not deny that pain puts it mark
to an unending game of who has
the joker and which ace is the highest,
when I judge questions and answers
in fast succession without coming
to a conclusion or of who is to blame
when juggling past and present
differences in habit and value.

I do not deny that guilt and pain
live close to each other and their weight
inflicted on me I am inflicting on others.
The day I am daring to live with and feel both,
even when darkness does not seem
to lift and echoes do not stop being thrown
back at me, will be a beautiful day.



















Poetry by Scharlie Meeuws
Read 674 times
Written on 2007-09-30 at 15:55

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