It’s all about the word:
On being a human, a counsellor, and a writer BY ISABELLA MORI
i’m dying of thirst because of the vast empty because of the dry dust and the sand within me that soaks up even the last drop i’m not starving but i thirst for the waters that gather up down or some other place but not where my tongue lies swollen
S
o starts a poem I wrote many years ago after I delivered my children and myself from my abusive ex-husband and made room for all the hard stuff in my life to come to the surface. Later, many of my therapy sessions started with one of my poems. Theologian Michael Dowd calls poetry “night language”—language that lives in a world where much is felt and not seen. Night language can express ideas and experiences that are otherwise hard to articulate. “i’m not starving / but i thirst” was a way to convey that while there was enough sustenance in my life in many ways, some vital element was in scarce supply—and that I felt that the reason for that scarcity lay within myself. What exactly that scarcity was about was unclear to me, as was why I experienced it—but that’s the stuff of night language: touching on the unspoken, the unknown. My ability to write poetry came from growing up in a family that screwed me up yet at the same time gave me the tools to deal with it. My parents showed me a model of marriage that validated living with an abusive spouse—“stand by your man!”—but also gave me a sense of justice and self-determination. This early experience of agency would later help me
18
wordworks | 2021 Volume III September
