the Silent Treatment -- poetic form

My mother would give my dad the silent treatment,

sometimes for days, when they argued.

The house would shimmer and shake in the deafening quiet

My sister and I never knew what he did

or what she was so angry about

No one in the house knew what would break the cycle

of nothingness. No smile. No looking into the eyes.

Nothing that could suggest connection was necessary.

Curt words dealt with the home

Terse body language everyone could hear

screamed her rage with no sound.

I used to think my own dance with anger was anything but silent.

An F-bomb in quiet prose is more my style

A measured tone with surgically precise language

describing the offense, the affront to my world, my body

Lots and lots of words seems to be more my style.

I’ve learned the verbal choreography of anger

necessary in the worlds of men.

But seven years ago, I woke up to a Reality 

I had resisted seeing for decades:

the centuries’ long abandonment, the inexcusable abuse

of women, girls, little boys, all of creation.

Silenced. Shoved aside. Raped. Pillaged.

God protects us from nothing,

even if He sustains us in all things (says James Finley)

Goddess seems to have lost the battle, if not yet the war (says me).

She came too late, really, for this little girl to not be abandoned.

For many, this signals a rupture of faith,

a departure from the faith community,

errant in its ignorance

culpable in its persistent choice to neglect. 

But how do you leave something that is five decades

embedded into your very cells? your sense of purpose in the world?

You don’t. At least not without spending the rest of your precious years

on this mysterious twirling sphere of abundant grace

fighting what is already a part of you.

Then I realized today that my mother was onto something.

What else can a woman disempowered in a dangerous world

do with her righteous anger, her abandonment as an infant

by the Sacred, a little-girl-to-be who wouldn’t know 

she was beautiful as a girl, she was perfect as the girl she is

until she was an older woman, nearly fifty years old?

She can give All That Is Holy the Silent Treatment.