Gillie Harries

Healing

At the risk of headiness

tack into a full following wind

and experience in your bones

 the recklessness of heeling.

It takes preparation, skillful, diligent,

knowledgeable work, some fine balance, to

reach that point,

time of flight on water,

the exhalation of joy and sweet release

after collective effort.

Come about, tack, sheet in,

repeat your surrender and laugh

a full-bodied whoop of communal joy.

Or, when you've been sutured

back to some sense of a whole

yet bare the scars to prove the scalpel

once your birthing partner, you'll possess that

crucial knowledge;

that wounding has its own frame,

her grip slips and slides

in an uncircadian rhythm

all it's gordian own, to a slow healing,

yet it arrives unannounced.

The carmine knotted flesh

runs smooth and pale once more,

a fingernail of pearlescent skein

only a mortician would notice

uniquely.

So timeliness and breathing in courage

standing under a hopeful sunlight,

exhaling quiet healthful choice,

simply observing the hedge sparrows,

finches, hanging from the winter pergola for dear life –

pecking for their very survival, foreshadowing winter's

bones with tiny habitual intent.

And if these months of terror

have you unchanged, indifferent,

then reconsider, look to yourself

and choose a love

of something precious or the ordinary, someone

wondrous or quotidian,

make amends for the life

you choose to heal.

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