Saturday's Poem

This week has been a very sad one for us all here in mid-Wales. For readers of this blog who not from the UK you may not have heard that there has been an abduction and a murder of a five year old girl, April Jones, in Machyllneth in my own county.  These sort of things just do not happen here.  The response of our community has been amazing and I am so proud of the hundreds of volunteers who have come from miles around to help in the search for April; I am so proud of the Welsh rescue services and the police too.  It is a cliche but my heart goes out to April's family. I have four granddaughters of my own and cannot begin to imagine how April's mother must be feeling. 

The news has been full of children's suffering of late. Prior to that poor child being taken there were stories in the media of the alleged abuse of children by the late Jimmy Saville. This followed the Rochdale Social Services affair which shocked us all. 

Some folk question why adults wait so long to speak of their abuse as children.  Many indeed go to their graves without ever telling a soul.

I was inspired to write a poem.

Abuse

It is what she wants them to know

but she doesn’t want to tell

and doesn’t want to remember.

It is what her brain won’t  recall

but rather chooses to forget

until triggered, like a failsafe, out of  

its save-from-wounding safety catch.

It is what she needs to say

but which is held instead within,

buried in a store of memories, incurred like fines.

It is what she never understood;

a trauma of troubles, feelings too new,

just hands and touchings, far too strange for understandings

for what in truth is normal to a child

believing touch is touch, is touch, is touch?

Is it really such a slight pain, this silence,

dulled and muffled up against all elements,

carried like convictions in a tally of a life?
Is it now that she is old, yet still that child

that she is dreaming of her deathbed where there may be spilled

a riot of revelations, a telling of all truths

outpoured to all her kin within a testament of tears?

But for now she doesn’t blurt, she doesn’t even whisper of his ways

but turns her face and self away 

and shuts the door on memories of shame,

her frailty and fear still hidden

behind the door that has slipped once more ajar.

Cait O’Connor