Poem 6 – Resilience
Resilience is not about being brave, or strong and it’s not about not falling apart. Rather it is the capacity to be afraid, to not know how you will get through this, to fall down and then to falteringly start to re-group and re-emerge, complete with scars. Resilience is about facing into a storm of grief and allowing it to change your form so that you can feel it pass through you and over you and around you. Resilience is not about forgetting, getting over it, coming to terms. It is about feeling, re-feeling, remembering and re-remembering, living and becoming.
…it’s possible to peer into the face of tragedy and somehow emerge fundamentally changed, with an ability to affect the world in previously unimaginable ways.
– David B. Feldman Ph.D, Lee Daniel Kravetz,
Resilience
It was the way the world upturned
with you inside it, the way you thought
you knew the path then without warning
you’re picking gravel from your knees,
the way you licked your skin for days,
following crystallised rivulets,
re-tracing burning tributaries,
long after the taste of salt had gone.
And then it was the way you claimed
the stones that scarred you, how you
turned them into beads, used them
to hold down sheets of words that
threatened to float away, how you
placed your finger in the salt jar
and brought it to your tongue.
Deborah Sloan
Without Issue 