Rage
(Crossposted from my LiveJournal)
Human beings suffer,
They torture one another,
They get hurt and get hard.
No poem or play or song
Can fully right a wrong
Inflicted and endured.
It seems to me that attempts to minimize or marginalize the effects of sexual violence are themselves born of a reflex to hit and hurt and protect...protect, I suppose, one's own darkness -- from criticism or exposure. I have done so in other contexts; I have stood by silent while others did in this context. I have, though I cannot gauge the impact, indulged in small violences of my own. And I have let my voice die when verbal and emotional (sometimes sexually-tinged) violence was offered to me.
That so many human beings have been offered worse makes me...I'm not sure what it makes me do. None of the usual anger metaphors suffice -- those of simmering or boiling or heat or pressure -- or even cold or stone. It's as if every cell in my body is turned to polarized light and can for one eternal moment offer only one message of immeasurable indignation. It's the closest analogy I can think of to the anger of God.
I'm Lisa. I've been far luckier than many, less lucky than some.
No Pity. No Shame. No Silence.
And I have hope.
History says, don't hope
On this side of the grave.
But then, once in a lifetime
The longed-for tidal wave
Of justice can rise up,
And hope and history rhyme.
So hope for a great sea-change
On the far side of revenge.
Believe that further shore
Is reachable from here.
Believe in miracle
And cures and healing wells.
Call miracle self-healing:
The utter, self-revealing
Double-take of feeling.
If there's fire on the mountain
Or lightning and storm
And a god speaks from the sky
That means someone is hearing
The outcry and the birth-cry
Of new life at its term.
-- Seamus Heaney, from "The Cure at Troy"
Peace to all.
