song_of_thea

The child with wide and anxious eyes

Feared to tell her mother the secrets that tormented her soul.

Last time the word, “bully” let fly

From quivering lips and sobs and anguished groans,

Mother did in vain try

To teach her daughter a mantra by rote

That upon her enemies, the child could recite

And while sticks and stones could destroy,

Threats, names and faces would be defied.

The poor girl wanted to believe this simple rhyme,

A mantra to banish those who wished ill on her sadly tormented soul.

How delightful to have a shield to render phrases like weapons

Thrown at her bounced off, impaired.

For no one dared to throw stones.

Not on this playground, at least.

But the mantra failed

Repeatedly

And with the beginning of, “Sticks and stones will break-“

They interjected,

“You are beneath sticks and stones,

You ugly and useless thing!

I might accidentally touch you, and die!”

They said in happy retort.

Incantation unfinished, the child would dissolve to nothing

And so the girl cried alone.

The child with narrowing eyes

Anxiously fret and fussed.

She began to hate school,

And the friends she claimed to trust,

Her mother- too busy to notice,

Her father- a long gone deadbeat,

Well-meaning aunts and uncles,

Grandparents and teachers, all echoed a similar mantra.

Then, they would disappear

One

By

One

When the child insisted that the mantra always failed,

And the girl began to die inside.

When sixteen years came

The teen was filled with quiet anger

Keeping her notes to paper,

The taunts and bullies had grown

Fleshed into poetic monsters set on

Sharing in happy misanthropy

Poe and Lovecraft told similar tales

But in a compelling manner that this girl did not possess

Yet enough readers were kept in rapt attention

Until the poetry stopped

At age 21

“Grow up!” a beloved told her,

“No one cares about your monsters, or your dreams!”

And once again, the anxious and wide eyed young adult

Now alone, closed her tome, and cried again

The world went dark

For many years

No mantras

No shields

No invocations were called to rouse the spirit of defense

Not until another anxious

Young girl with wide eyes pleaded with tears and wails

That the bullying stop.

A very concerned mother roared

Into the corners of the universe,

“It’s the twenty-first century! Has nothing changed?”

Followed by

A small

Voice,

Her OWN voice

From her childhood,

“What do I do now?”

Determined not to fail

Like her teachers

And mother and father

And grandparents, aunts and uncles,

The very concerned mother listened to the

Still small voice from her

Tormented childhood

Before giving an answer to her anguished daughter

“You can’t fight this alone,”

The mother finally said,

“And it is not your responsibility to.

Nothing you say or do will stop them,”

She said.

“Nothing will change with a rhyme

Or phrase of words, but

You can fight back,

Call upon your friends and teachers,

Call upon your mother and father,

And if someone throws a stone,

Here is how you block it.”

And after that child went to sleep,

The mother roared again into the ether

And the echo of others who were

Once helpless

Like that long ago child

Roared back in solidarity,

Unleashing those poetic monsters once more on this

Electronic paper