A Dialogue of Poems

I am way behind online, but am slowly working my way along my To Do list. Earlier this week at Imaginary Gardens with Real Toads,  Kenia's Wednesday Challenge was very intriguing: Write a poem that keeps a dialogue with another poem, or poet.


Right away, I knew I wanted to respond to Amy Barlow Liberatore's The Ward and Me at Amy's blog Sharp Little Pencil.  Amy's poem struck me with its description of a landscape I, too, have visited, with all of a mother's pain, trying with the sheer will of my spirit to tether a fragile child to this earth. I saw - and see -  that journey, not  as a story of brokenness, but rather of striving towards whatever wholeness is possible in the face of overwhelming adversity, and of the limits to our endurance of human pain.


My son is now 41, and has progressed through several lifetimes worth of evolution. He has suffered a great deal on his journey, but has lately won his way to greater stability and, often, he tells me, joy. He is a delight to me, still brilliant, hilarious, gifted at seeing the "little miracles", still writing, still creating music - classical music now, which he taught himself to do from library books. We agree that the journey we have made together  has brought us many gifts we might never have experienced by any other pathway. Gifts of compassion, communication, authenticity, respect and unconditional love. We might have wished for less suffering. But neither of us would have missed this journey for the world.


Here is Amy's poem, followed by my response.

The Ward and Me

by Amy Barlow Liberatore

Shadowy business, this
Nestled in the crook of a couch
for another shrink rap

My balance, shaky at best
This ward filled with walking open sores
Memories ooze from their psychic wounds
The runoff seeps up the floorboards
leaving smudgy, evil footprints

Traces of ghosts linger, follow us inmates:
Xeroxed Marleys, hovering phantoms whispering
what happened back when
back then

Grandma Blanche was a frequent flier,
restless for answers to
bizarre questions that made Grandpa cringe
and then commit her

They’d strap her down
They’d scorched her tortured brain
A sick science fair

I know that old game, how they
sucked the fun out of her
so I play along

I’m afraid but don’t let it show
I whistle a happy tune
This will all be over soon

I think

     *****     *****     *****     ****

Oh, I know this speckled landscape.

Aged shabby building, dismal ward 

old and dreary,gray, needing paint. 

No color anywhere.

Up the scuffed and shabby stairs,

I climb, 

my heart sinking.

It feels like

the abandoned ones

live here.

My laughing,hilarious boy


is now a fragile, lean six-footer,


seventeen and in the psych ward.


I peek into his room, 

I call his name.


His head emerges from the blanket.
He comes to me. 
He is shaking when we hug.

But he smiles, the same big smile.
His eyes - the same blue eyes,
though now haunted by the visions
of his waking dream.

I feel relief. This is still my son,
and I will tether him to this planet
by the sheer force
of a mother's will.
I will become a tree trunk
that he can fasten the kite
of his  tremulous heart to,
that heart trying to decide
if it is halfway in
or halfway out
of this old world.

"Make it stop," he says.
"It's like a bad trip that never stops,
like being in hell.
Voices, clamoring and shouting.
It's scary."

He is  brilliant, talented,
a mystic, a dreamer,
a musician, a lover of life,
with all of the sensitivity
of the creative artist.
He has walked the fine line
between daybreak and hellfire,
and has fallen.

"Please. Make it stop."
I will. Somehow,
if it takes a hundred years,
I will Make. It. Stop.

While he sleeps, I watch
the other depressed souls,
locked within their lonely worlds of pain,
they, too, making their solitary treks
through the labyrinth
of their own minds.

I think about the fragility and, also,
the resilience of the human spirit,
that in a nanosecond, any one of us
might topple over into that land
of rain-speckled windows, tears,
and no more hope.

My gentle son now inhabits
this barren landscape.
He, too, paces these drab corridors,
hours marked out
in pill cups, naps and hospital trays.
Where will his beauty find a place to land
in halls so bleak and bare?

I tiptoe into his room,
where he sleeps, mercifully delivered
from his new waking reality.

Beside his bed I see a scrap of paper
with a few lines written
in his quirky spikey script.
"I am Cloud.
 Someone blow me
Away."

My mother's heart grows cold with fear.
I walk out of the room,
down the gray hall,
the gray, drab stairs,
out into the noisy city street,
alive around me,
while my son lies
in the psych ward,
his life hanging in the balance.

I am Cloud.
Someone blow me
Away.