Addressing Fear

Poem-a-Day Day 3 Prompt:  Write a poem that scares you.
This one is really challenging me.  The worst fears that I could
conjure are the negatives to the work that I have chosen to
do in the world.  I do not want to speak it.

This is the four o’clock ramble
the tumble into chasms
the angst that awakens me into the story
of the world I fear I have delivered these children to:

Where the grab and the fist
assure the rights and privilege
of Me and Mine above all else.

Where rage is the fuel that carries
the fool between apathies.

Where greed is the creed,
and the goal of existence
is the next shiny trinket
constructed of toxins by slaves
in some faraway land.

A world without spinners
and dyers and knitters and painters,
where poets write ad copy,
where wonders on a screen
fascinate more utterly
than feather, stone or tree.

I can write no more of this.
My hand is frozen into a claw
A roaring fills my ears.
I dare not let this story
see any more light of day.

I’ll tidy up the mess of negative emotions at the end here with a
Joseph Campbell quotation: “The cave you fear to enter holds
the treasure that you seek.”

2 thoughts on “Addressing Fear

  1. Wonderfully frightening. Your words come from your soft, kind, open heart. I am frightened that I am becoming something hard and tight and dark. My reason for softness and openness is no longer here to keep my innate nature at bay. Your words remind me to try harder, to stop being the fool full of rage. Thank you.

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    • I’m glad these words could do more than just cause me to panic. I walk sometimes on those cliffs with the Fool, or else where would the night terrors come from? What a weight to carry. And you have reason to be there. But your heart is made of strong stuff. Strong enough to keep soft. Sometime we’ll get together and rage a while together, and then laugh a bit in the face of it, eh? If you’re on the cliffs with the Fool, might as well dance a bit, too, just to feel the wind. Love.

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