Resistance moon: Picking the scabs off your heart

For Anne Sexton, poetry was part of a course of therapeutic treatment for depression and other mental health issues. She suffered her first breakdown after the birth of her first daughter in 1954, and then again after her second daughter’s birth. It was so difficult for her to enroll in a writing class that she had a friend make the phone call to register, and go with her to the first session. But poetry turned out to be one of her strongest connections to life.

Even so, that connection was not strong enough. In 1974, aged 45, she drank a slug of vodka and then committed suicide by carbon monoxide poisoning.

Sexton wrote about what we might think of as the “small” things—the ordinariness of everyday life. No Big Themes—unless the quiet courage to make a choice every day to continue with life can be considered Big. In fact, in “Courage”, she talks about that quality in various forms at varying stages of life.

For those of us who are finding ways large and small to resist the Kleptocrat and other authoritarian regimes, this is a good one to carry with us.

“Courage”

It is in the small things we see it.
The child's first step,
as awesome as an earthquake.
The first time you rode a bike,
wallowing up the sidewalk.
The first spanking when your heart
went on a journey all alone.
When they called you crybaby
or poor or fatty or crazy
and made you into an alien,
you drank their acid
and concealed it.

Later,
if you faced the death of bombs and bullets
you did not do it with a banner,
you did it with only a hat to
comver your heart.
You did not fondle the weakness inside you
though it was there.
Your courage was a small coal
that you kept swallowing.
If your buddy saved you
and died himself in so doing,
then his courage was not courage,
it was love; love

as simple as shaving soap.

Later,
if you have endured a great despair,
then you did it alone,
getting a transfusion from the fire,
picking the scabs off your heart,
then wringing it out like a sock.
Next, my kinsman, you powdered your sorrow,
you gave it a back rub
and then you covered it with a blanket
and after it had slept a while
it woke to the wings of the roses
and was transformed.

Later,
when you face old age and its natural conclusion
your courage will still be shown in the little ways,
each spring will be a sword you'll sharpen,
those you love will live in a fever of love,
and you'll bargain with the calendar
and at the last moment
when death opens the back door
you'll put on your carpet slippers
and stride out.