Valleys and Volleys

Down in the valley, deep in the shadows of doubt.
A mother and a daughter unable to communicate past their own pain. Lashing out.
Rage is far more contagious that peace.
The lessons of the heart taught in high places easily forgotten, in the shadows of the valley.

Fear is taking over.

Futile, longing, frustration over pain not heard or understood,
hands scratch and hit as a mothers hands had done before.
Traditions handed down,
from generation to generation.

Fingers tugging and pulling hair; fists,
piercing deeper than flesh into already fragile hearts.

Girl and Mother...
ONE.
punching.
Pushing
denying fault.

Screaming for peace, as their hands burn on contact with soft flesh.
One kicks the other
and the other cries out and pushes back,

the lines blurring until it is impossible to untangle the rage
of mother,
daughter,
grandmother.

Impossible to determine who is victimizing whom?
Were does fault reside when rage is so comfortable and familiar in so many places?

"She" lashed out at her destroyer,
finding intimate familiarity in hurt,
in the twisted comfort of "there".

Peace is elusive.

The hands that caressed the child,
now slap every memory of kindness away.

Drink it in feel the burn...

Walk to the red... Dance with the devil..

Take a sip from the goblet of something different.

Be on the side that giveth and taketh away
arbitrarily and powerfully.

No longer a victim.

Powerful and righteous.

Run from the place where you feel alone
and scared
and powerless...

So much easier to give in to the rage.

When it is all over,
neither can remember the words.
Only the pain of a mother who doesn't know,
who despises
who knows above all else,
you must be a liar and a whore.

There is no defense believable.

Fear doesn't listen to truth,
fear lies sweetly,
boldly,
seductively.

"She" is not her mother,
"She" was taking her power back.
"She" is different.

This is what "She" tells herself.
This is what "She" believes
long after the uniformed men and the paramedics leave her to her thoughts.

That look in their eyes, (they know she has her power back!)
They can make up lies,
try to take her daughter with them,
(they cannot take her power!)

Their gazes shift (because she is powerful!)
They are shaking their heads
unable to meet her eyes,
looking away ('cause they are men who can't take a woman who speaks her mind!)

They are weak.
"She" sees this,
"She" believes it to be truth and so it becomes...

Her truth.
Powerful truth.

She sits up straighter in her chair,
lifts her chin a bit higher...
SHE knows truth, SHE sees what they are afraid of.

She has power.

Men are afraid of women with power and that's a fact.


She never looks up.
Never sees the hand above her reaching out to her.

She is lost in her own troubled spirit.

Lost in the black, another storm brewing.