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Saturday, April 11, 2015

#11 PO-EMotion Despair


April is National Poetry Month. Every year, my dear friend (and poet Extraordinaire), Mary Lee Hahn chooses a theme, and writes a poem each day. Mary Lee blogs and posts her poems at two different places- YEAR OF READING and a fabulous new poetry blog POETREPOSITORY.

This year, Mary Lee has chosen the theme, "PO-EMotions." She promises, "This year, I will write a poem a day that either evokes an emotion, or uses an emotion word in the title or body of the poem." Her list of emotions is here. I'm joining her, at least some days.

Today's emotion is despair.


"mariana trench"

few travel
to life's mariana trench
where enormous pressure
creates a vacuum
that sucks guts inward
and crushes
heart
and spirit

and where
darkness
is much blacker
than black
and you wonder
if you will ever
see light again
or whether you would
actually even
recognize light
if it was,
in fact,
there

and barely recognizable
but scary large
bottom dwellers
brush against you
entangling your
arms and legs
in their stringy tentacles
and making it
much
harder
to swim

the descent
is rapid
and imperceptible

but the ascent
to life's surface
is slow
and so
very
painful.

(c) Carol Wilcox, 2015




3 comments:

Mary Lee said...

I'm hoping that friendship (and even poetry) are giving you the oxygen you need as you come up from your own Mariana Trench.

Linda B said...

Your analogy is so apt, Carol. Those bottom dwellers catch & hold. I hope you're pushing upward, every day a little more.

Kay said...

Why is it so easy to fall into despair and such a slow and painful process to rise out of it? I enjoyed the imagery in your poem.