Poetry and traumatic times

After that amazing question was asked and answered, 'What do you do with your rage?', I realized I could write poetry to process mine too. This was during the question and answer session after the poetry reading at the Migrants' Resource Centre in London last week.

I won't only be looking back at rage, but at many traumatic moments in the run up to and after starting home educating.  Gradually the many situations I have experienced or witnessed are coming back to my mind. I am letting myself just say one word to myself, like gravel or door, as a reminder of each incident. These memories are purely visual or emotional.

Often when I wrote my diary at that time I found I could not list the events in order, I would write something like, I'm not sure when this bit happened (during the evening). So even the sequence of events was shocked out of my mind.

Other events would succeed each other, but I would not know how one section joined to the next because a linking bit of time would not be in my memory, it would have been blanked out, even though it was only a few hours earlier. I knew it was missing because the memories would move from one location in the house to another with nothing covering how we got there. I didn't know how much time was missing.

They were like snapshots actually, like the time I was in a car crash and all I could remember were a sequence of separate moments, as if I had opened my eyes several times to see different instants, but had my eyes shut in between each one.

I had thought I would need to find another counsellor, but now I sense that I could work by myself on this.

I think it would be best to create some sort of ritual to surround the calling to mind and choosing of words for this remembering. I would like to know that I won't ask myself to think about these things out of the blue so a lead up walk to a special place might help me keep this all sectioned off safely. I wonder where I might like to try this out.

I have a chair my grandfather used and there are various places in the garden. The village has benches going right out into the countryside. There are cafes in Didcot. There is a whole stone church in my street to which I have a key.

Since thinking about this idea I have left it alone. Doing a post here is quite enough for now.