I came to be free

It can’t be real work
If you don’t feel the grind
It’s got to be painful
Can’t let yourself slide

“Gaman” is the strength
As the Japanese say
To put your nose on the stone
And to grind it away

So grind it I did
Though once I did know
The joy and the freedom
Of feeling in flow

Flow was a rhythm
A music inside
It smoothed out the edges
Of pain in my life

Flow my companion
As dark as it seemed
When I didn’t feel safe
I could always daydream

I’d dream of the person
I needed to be
To break from the bondage,
Soar up, and fly free

With jets on my feet
And wings in my heart
I dreamed of the day
I could make a fresh start

So hopeful I ran
From a home full of pain
And fled to the sea
Trading snow for the rain

On the shores of the land
Where children had died
I wept for myself
To the ocean I cried …

“Oh ocean, my ocean
In waters so deep
Beloved Earth Mother
Hold my tears as I weep”

To the ocean I cry
“Don’t leave me to die
Hear passion in me
And come to my side”

In my grief for a life
I had lived with such hope
I felt I was broken
Like the butt of God’s joke

My tears soaked the land
As the tide lapped the sand
And the ocean held space
And the trees held my hand

I cried for my father
Under his father’s gun
And I cried that I couldn’t
Be the dutiful son

I wept all the tears
I had stopped long before
When I couldn’t break down
To a puddle on the floor

But the ocean knows pain
Sheds blood every day
The waves create carnage
And then wash it away

The pain of the ocean
To gulp children’s blood
To drown a whole village
In thousand-year floods

The sea knows the pain
Yet onward it flows
Like breathing in tides
And exhaling ghosts

The sea can scream back
As loud as you wish
Can savagely end you
Like sharks eat a fish

Have I come here to die?
Or to find some new growth?
Could that be my choice?
And can it be both?

Because feeling those times
When I wished I would die
Feels like dying again
And again the next time

If healing is feeling
And feeling’s like dying
Then healing’s like killing
The me that’s here crying

A slaughter of me’s
With my blood in the water
Like seals being hunted
By sharks they are slaughtered

The slaughter of me’s
Who I had to relive
Every time I was slain
And I had to forgive

Forgive my belief
That I could be so harmed
By people and things
To the point of alarm

The waves are still breathing
After eons of slaughter
All the blood I can shed
Just a drop in the water