Belle Randall

Cast Off

By Belle Randall

If thy own hand . . . offend thee
—Matthew 18:8

Self-hatred? No, no dear: that seems inflated—

chagrin: the shame you feel when friends withdraw

for reasons they leave tactfully unstated,

leaving you to guess at your faux pas

From all you did and didn’t say for ages,

as in some vast congressional report,

your sin, at last, is lost among the pages;

a snow of detail cuts inquiry short.

In downtown windows where late sunlight glares,

you see yourself, as if you’d never met.

Who is this rumpled lookalike who wears

a blouse like yours, the armpits dark with sweat?

Your eighth grade diary still makes you cringe

saved—for what?—that you might now despise

pages time has lent a jaundiced tinge

pouring forth their daisy-dotted i’s?

Some second-guesser in you finds untrue

the echo of your own voice in your ears,

and wants to ask which one most sickens you:

the voice that whines with neediness and fears,

Or one no doubts can ever undermine,

that speaks before a general assembly,

proclaiming loudly what to do with thine

own hand (or his, or mine), should it offend thee?

Source: Poetry (September 2009).

I am sure we have all been in situations in which a friend or even a set of friends turn against you and you are at a loss as to why this has happened. I think the above poem captures this awkward and terrifying moment or memory well. Sometimes, we find out the reason, and it is not just or it is based on a lie that is told by someone we thought was our friend. It can be based on a shared confidence that someone we trusted with our lives who decided to bare all for unknown reasons. Ah, yes. I have been there. After all these years I can remember with as much puzzlement as I had in those years. In some memories I have began to re-frame them with new insight and with that new information in understanding what had happened. It still hurts though.

It helps to read Randall's poem though. To have our pain and sorrow in someone's else's words, to have them echoed in someone's else pain but portrayed so well in a poet's ability to express it and with that talent and know how some detachment for it means nobility and the knowledge it has happened to someone else and someone as sensitive as this poet.

There are many reasons for the existence of poets and in this month of poetry this is one function I like to reflect on. Poets give us validity of feeling, of existence and of purpose. Reading of our pain and what we go through in their words makes things a bit better to bear and the tears are less because we feel more dignified. Yes, we say to ourselves, that was how it was. That was how I felt. Yes, this poet knows and can feel and say what it was to be me on that summer day when my friends turned against me. It felt like I hated me as they must have hated me too. Thank you poets of the world.

Poets become our representatives, our attorneys, our knights and with their swords they go out and create for each of us a sense of value in the courts of society and culture. We are not such bad people when the poets speak for us as they often do and they even speak for those who's voices have been silent forever by cruel tyrants and gods. They are the true equalizers as long as their voices cannot be silenced and few have been. They have been shot, hung, poisoned, gassed but their poems still speak loud and clear. We, as a human race, have much to be grateful for to this group of human beings. Thank you again.