70th birthday poem
With All That’s In Between
Remember thinking “it is normal for life to be a struggle”…admitting life is a struggle, is that victory? Only partial…
Life is a victory as well…
Start with a wise old man in training of seventy years, still not at end of the journey (so far as he knows) his blood flows many times upon the road, nearly killed too many times to count, unwittingly wounding loving souls …
or a newborn overpowering mother’s sedation…
Incest starting at age five, a joy to be alive, the lucky ones find victory after survival from gauntlets of tortured relationships, love tangled with pain confused each with the other, again the lucky ones escape the graves or psychiatric wards to find strange salvation…
re-sedating self with booze, pills, smoke, and other anesthesia…takes years, marriage, fatherhood, brothers and sisters in recovery to break those bonds…
Macro and micro struggles and victories, not so instant replays of that first struggle to breathe that we don’t remember…
Fill the gaping hole in the soul, such an effort until one wins by giving up the fight…then long-sought peace the sweet release of breathing without screaming; keening becomes singing hymns of gratitude…home is discovered, recovery uncovered, music of spheres replacing fears that dread will never end.
Or start with a young man waking to himself upon the stage counterfeiting rage, joy, hope, despair, love, hate, diverse other humors until they become reality in life offstage…
or timeless love and heartbreak over and again, waking, reawakening to romance followed close upon by abject misery…so perplexed he then determines he is meant to be alone his whole life through…
celebrating forty-first wedding anniversary…
the animal nurse looking in disbelief at another nurse, after some time to realize she and he are really meant to be together throughout life…
new father cutting twisted umbilical cord of firstborn daughter,
cutting the cord of second born girl,
both born through blood and pain of his mighty lover…
ragged raging marriage fights, heartsick nights, joyful reconciliations…
earning Master’s degree to heal others with art…(What nerve he has! Yet wounded souls heal wounded souls throughout the stories of creation.)
or Baptist kid in Sunday School, saltines and tomato juice foreshadowing confusions of communion…
or Druid man Fili (poet) studying ancient craft of word on word, parallel meaning, sound and magic…
Can’t fit it all within the walls built by these words…too much more, I do implore on readers for their mercy.
Start and start and start until the heartbeats end…but do they really end when none has come back from those shores to wail or laugh upon behalf of all of us?
What’s all the fuss? Cuss if you must; regardless we all fail and win to start the story time and time again.
~ Wry Welwood
2nd of May, circa Beltaine 2022
written in response to CRY magazine call “What’s your biggest struggle?”
To the attention of Kern Carter.