Hurt and Understanding

Hurt understands consideration:

These words whose scopes reflex so intercedently

This way and that, as how one might consider

How taught consideration voluntarily concedes

Its graciousness to others

Whether a brother?

Or else a mother?

The laws of nature jingling on God’s angling golden chain

Working a way within dry hearts may make all plain

And wide and straight, a pathway, highroad, for the King of all;

Hurt wrings, and oh!, betimes harsh consternations

Blend oscillations

With fraught contagions

A time when you before were too, too, ruthless innocent

A thoughtless instrument for crushing latitude

And a barrier against emergent thrusts of sympathy

A carrier triumphant of a regnant blindness

Whose measures cold

Engendered cold

Self-righteous self assured justifications

Your heart apart

By slighted tribulations mocked misfortune’s peers

Gave only a decided hard ungenerous regard

Since ‘she deserved it’

So you – you served it,

On him, ‘as verdict’

Thus did you hit the target with the arrow sorrow

Nor yet no narrow puncture piercing through your own aplomb

Nor at this juncture qualifies your smart and surly stride

Not now

But how!

The sting smarts in the biting of the scaly adder’s tooth

Contented in the garden of complacency you’ve snoozed

When came the creature offering you love’s all-enlightening bruise.

To self-accuse

Give your escape no egress

But follows-on full-weight, and measure, poured to overflowing

Your make-acquaintance-cue towards a state of better-knowing

A destination opens; your consent repairs a-going

Where went those cruel views

Jeered jibes called fools?

You are, by custom requisition,

Become, and roundly, self-remanded

Absolutely upper-handed

Placed under God

An instant, of a sudden,

A harvest haul of consequence comes home and laden

For your dismay and joy

Bespreading on your lawns

With complementary barrowloads of mixed-up grain and thorns

A bracket might make bookmark of your livelong page of failure

As fusillades of fire do honour or wantonly destroy

So a case is opened on you; bankrolled hope sits counted ready

For good and ill to work you, passing through the hands of many

You can also find this poem at our metanomalies blog: https://metanomalies.com/hurt-and-understanding/