POETS UNITED - HEALING

“The greatest healing therapy is friendship and love.” - Hubert H. Humphrey

The theme for this week’s Poets United poetical challenge is “Healing”. To heal is the desired outcome of much treatment, but often nowadays modern medicine is cure-focussed and the patient may suffer much during the attempts at the restoration of health. I remember when at University and later in hospitals, we were told that “to care is the primary objective of the healer, to cure a secondary one.” This I think is often forgotten in modern medicine, which seeks magic bullets, efficacious remedies, wonderful cure-alls and powerful panaceas that cure all ills. Such fantastic treatments may have dire side-effects and often the cure they bring about may exact a terrible price on the patient’s health – one disease cured, but its place taken by another, caused by the medication…

Sterile Moonlight

The moon tonight, stronger than absinthe,

Sharper than broken glass,

Softer than mossy ground;

More powerful an aphrodisiac than ripe figs,

Intoxicating, like new wine,

More tantalising than wild strawberries.

The moon at midnight both a lover and a rapist,

A tender paramour and a loathsome abuser,

Caresses, titillates, empowers – cuts, lashes, lacerates;

Engages more violently than a barbaric conqueror,

Touches more tenderly than a mother’s kiss,

Feels and strikes, wounds and heals concurrently.

The moon last night, an elixir of paramount efficacy,

Honey and poison mingled into a potent potion, a panacea –

It cures, it kills, and saps my spirit.

Fertile, like a newly rained-upon ploughed field,

My body gathers moonbeams to weave into cloth

Covering my fecund, protuberant belly.

The moon some night watches the agony of my birth pangs,

It gently assists like an experienced midwife,

The joy of motherhood a remedy exquisite.

Mooncloth of moonbeam woven, turns from raiment into shroud:

My newborn snatched by the moon’s fury,

And in its place, a lifeless changeling by my side.