Poem for a Broken Toe
and for all the other broken things within me
I broke my pinky toe last weekend, jammed it on my wooden bath mat as I was getting into the shower. When I told a friend of mine, she said, “Don’t worry. There’s no non-embarrassing way to break your toe.” So at least there’s that.
I’ve since been laid up on the couch with my foot on a throne of pillows, making my way through Matthias Schoenaerts’s filmography and spending an inordinate amount of time on Duolingo. Also, I wrote a poem. It’s about my broken toe. It’s also not really about my broken toe.
Poem for a Broken Toe
Pain blooms purple
like a foxglove warning of
danger beneath the surface. I am
swollen with color, an untenable sunset.
How can such a small thing
destroy me so completely?
Forced into stillness, I rest,
and yet, I am vibrating
with the effort to heal
what is broken within me.
I am undone, now becoming
something new.
The shadows grow long, and
my mind lengthens with them.
The low sun reveals what is lost
in the harsh glare of the day.
Retreat from melancholy.
Things are not yet what they will be.
WEEKEND POTPOURRI:
Currently on repeat:
A poem in which Anagha Smrithi prises apart the she of the morning with her hands
James Lucas looks at the surreal details of impossible sculptures
Yasumi Toyoda looks at dreams and memory in the shadow of old ruins
Oh look, another poem, this one from Samuel Forbes, who has become one of my new favorite writers
Photos and thoughts about the Clingmans Dome Observation Tower, part of a series from Owen Davies called The Great Outsiders, which explores the forgotten modernist architecture of the US National Parks.
A(nother) poem:
RISK
By Anaïs Nin
And then the day came, when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.
Beautiful, Yardena. There is a motif in my writing that perhaps “breaking isn’t bad, not necessarily.” (A direct quote from my “The Drive”)
It reminded me of that.
So does here beauty arise from breaking.
“Pain blooms purple
like a foxglove warning of
danger beneath the surface.”
An absolutely wonderful start, and the momentum sustains throughout. Love this piece 🙂 and thank you so much for the shoutout, Yardena! It’s an honor.