desperation and interpretation
She cries out, and when
I come she accepts no hand, nor help. I am a stranger and beneath holding up
her tangled hair.
Yet she lies there with quiet sighs and desperation painted over her like blood.
As I bend over her warm and gasping body she smiles and says words to distract
me from her plight.
Outrageous claims of wellness while her sores lay raw and cause me to lean in
closer.
At this distance I smell the sweat of her struggles with unknown assailant,
and she tells me that she will be better now, and again tries to
offend my judgment with her insufficient smile.
She asks me to leave her be, and restates unreasonable belief
in recovery. I wonder if this is shock or some dying pride.
Yet I feel how drenched she is in her current struggling state.
What is worse than coming across her with culprit still apparent to then defend
her virtue and vision in quixotic vengeance; is instead to come too late as
pathetic paramedic with neither medicine nor anesthetic.
All I am given is feeble will to offer again and again services that I am unqualified
to perform, and that she will refuse to receive.
Is it debt she fears?
That being helped she then will live
but fears that she will owe others for that gift?
I reach out in desperate attempt to apply concern and comfort
to this unwilling wanting waif who is as vehement in her denial as I am in my
compulsion to compete with this desperate debility.
I sense her healing is out of reach if she will not first accept the injuries
that she has sustained.
Or at least admit the pain that she struggles to refuse and in never adopting
her damaged body she cannot
hope to hold it or allow others to tend to it as she quietly bleeds.
Yet I cannot even ascertain what she has suffered, but know
only that she suffers still.
Her pungent wounds fill the air more than her cries and while she has lain here
for too long and has rejected others with their own feeble offers of help,
she will neither humble herself to their ministrations, nor will this allow
her soul to heal, and this then becomes festering infection and the halting
of hope that she will insist is unneeded. While it is as needed as
tenderness is needed for a child’s cry.