Page 45 - Dark Matter:Women Witnessing Issue2

Pacific

Megan Hollingsworth

This my dear friends is utter sorrow

all that is at the bottom of the well

now rises to the surface

of a dying ocean and I am done weeping

I am cried out

I have given all my tears to the billion dollar boy

who on his 20th birthday treated 20,000 guests

to a party and of these a special 2 to the aerial

massacre of more than 20 elephants.

All the tears I have cried and those still to come

for the babes washing ashore

I give to these 3 who in amusement

killed the lovers, enough tears to wash them safely down river

where the ocean waits with open arms, wailing waves

to consume them. The boy, his friends,

the numbers, they are fiction. Yet

I am cried out, at last

resting in a patch of sunlight

long hidden

I use numerals in this poem to call out the strangeness of determining an appropriate response to loss

based on numbers

Note:

There comes a point when the body is through experiencing sorrow induced by seeing others in pain.

At this stage, the body is free to channel this potent energy directly to its creative expression in word

or image. My body reached this freedom after more than a decade of chronic depression (cleared

through African grief ritual in February 2007) followed by several years of debilitating sorrow that

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