(re my memoir about conducting poetry workshops in Pentridge in the early eighties)
For months and years
I’ve been writing the prison,
that place of darkness
which haunts me still.
An exorcism? A record?
A witness statement?
There are times I want to
stamp on the memories,
feel them crunch under my boots
like broken glass – traversing
yet again the stages of grief,
arriving again at anger.
But that’s temporary.
Let me instead celebrate
in these recollections
those who did not succumb
to the institutional boot
on the neck: those
who refused to break,
reassembling their own fragments
over and over again,
spitting them out as poems,
mending their shattered segments
with lines of gold, of light.
Written in response to my own prompt for Poets and Storytellers United's Friday Writings #84: to be inspired by the phrase, 'Broken glass crunching under the boot steps.'
(My soon-to-be-published memoir begins with a long poem – quite different from this one – called 'Writing the Prison'.)