A Poem for Pain

My poem of the day is on pain and the cluster of emotion that comes with it. How often do we find ourselves searching for reasons behind our pain? This search is a problem too difficult to explain, and so this poem is not an attempt to answer the "why?" but to address the "what"--that process of thought which inevitably follows misfortune.

 

“When pain is to be born,

a little courage helps more than much knowledge,

a little human sympathy more than much courage,

and the least tincture of the love of God more than all.”

                        -C.S. Lewis

 

Traffic
 

I wonder through the tint

of this protective window,

 

wonder about this scene exposed

to me, akin to the first time

 

I saw a man like him and wondered,

like I do now, how long (if at all) he checked

 

the mirror above his drain, if he noticed

the unattended cowlick roosting atop his skull—

 

I should have grabbed the lining of his coat

or stung a fist in the chin above his throat,

 

an attempt to stop the bloody shrill,

the shrieking melody of man and steel—
 

I wonder, would my wonder serve better as a wish

for those collapsed on this axis of chance
 

and free will—I should have talked to him still,

should have searched for a thought to impose—

 

and blue men search for a name within his clothes

and his family will search for reasons, they will search

 

for breath beneath the stains that latch the fabric to his chest,

they will guess at his pain and they will search

 

and find fabricated answers, and nothing, and knowing this

I reach

 

onward to peace

desert my wonder to dissolve into hope,

wistful exhaust over forgotten street