Ponder
Tending the Nest by Todd Jenkins
Anger reared its caustic head
and I, socioculturally programmed,
fed its gaping maw
with the righteous indignation
of manna from my soul,
but there was never enough.
It was a bottomless pit of need.
After a long while, when I had
long-since passed exhaustion,
I sat with the fireworks, in silence.
That’s when I noticed
that there was another being
in the same nest;
a fragile creature
with a broken wing,
stuffed underneath
the voracious and vocal one.
I held her head tenderly
in my hand, and
when she opened her eyes,
I asked, “What’s your name,
dear one?”
As I leaned in
to hear her wispy voice,
she answered, “I am Grief.”
“Who are your parents?”
“They came from
a house called childhood innocence;
a dwelling torn down
by the wrecking ball of adolescence
and the sledgehammer of adulthood;
both of them flattened
by the freight train of change.”
As my eyes began to leak,
down my cheek flowed a creek.
The longer I sat,
the more clearly I saw
that it was Grief
who needed to be nourished,
listened to, and tended,
not Anger.
That was years ago.
Now, whenever Anger squawks,
I look below to see
which fractured wing
needs to be swaddled, so that
Grief can show me the path
along which my pain becomes,
not a burden of rage,
but a teacher and traveling companion
toward a place called tomorrow,
where hope is a candle in the window
that refuses to be extinguished.
