This isn't exactly uplifting or cheery, but probably appropriate. It's by a poet I really like and thought you guys might be interested in her (though she can be pretty bitter) - Marge Piercy
Eating My Tail
There are times in my life to which I return like a cat scratching, licking, worrying at an old sore, a long since exterminated nest of fleas behind my ear. I seem sure that if I keep poking and rubbing that old itch will finally be quelled. Or is it a pre-eminent pattern I seek? A mapmaker returning to the mountains to pace out again the distances. Of course, if the massacre had not occurred in this pass, why would I care?
Some disasters alter the landscape and realign even the roads driven over years before. Yes, it is the bloody moon of pain that gives a lurid backlighting to this scene I peer at suspended, a second pallid moon beating my wings of anxiety silent as a bat. Yet if pain gives portent to the words spoken it denies entrance.
They sit at the table and eat. Wine is poured, she gets up to bring warm bread. Yellow apples are heaped in an orange bowl whose sides reflect candle flames. Telling a story, she takes his hand. I know of course what she thinks is happening and how wrong she is.
But if I opened his forehead, would I find the violence and anger to come? Ah, the past. It is turning out the pocket of a jacket I wore in the garden: random pencil nubs, plant ties, half a packet of seeds never planted, a mummified peach, herbs picked and forgotten - a combination of intention and waste. Is how it all fell down the meaning of that scene? Yet they laugh heartily and the soup steams and the golden apples shine like lumps of amber.
The present tears at the past as if living were something the mind could ever hold like water in a cup or a map in the hand. Maps are abstractions useful for finding whatever is actually entered on them. Otherwise you just walk in. And through. When you go back it's always someplace else.
