PAIN has an element of blank

I was recently astonished to find that my mother's life had been recorded in eight, brief lines. At least, I found what many of us close to her took to be the central struggle of her life. I knew this when I first marked it sometime last year in my Emily Dickinson anthology, and I thought of it today. Whether speaking of psychic or physical pain, this poem captures the reality of those who suffer chronically. Scripture calls Jesus "a man of sorrows, well acquainted with grief." Johnny Cash decided that his own personal scars were so deep that he needed to wear them on his sleeve and become the "Man in Black." He made his own troubled past into a new cause, as he championed the "poor and beaten down / livin' on the hungry side of town... the sick and lonely old / the wreckless ones whose bad trip left them cold..." Emily Dickinson, on the other hand, while a creative genius, became a recluse with strange, whimsical habits, a deep melancholy, and an acute, almost morbid sense of mortality after suffering the deaths of many close family and friends in her early life. She was also faced with her mother's chronic illness as an adult, which kept her home as primary caregiver, and in her last years her own decline due to what was probably chronic nephritis. I've heard it said of her that no one writes more authentic consolation poetry. I'm never sure where that line is between normal, healthy pain--the so-called "anxiety of becoming," the fallout of living in a fallen world--and the kind of pain that warps you for good.

PAIN has an element of blank;
It cannot recollect
When it began, or if there were
A day when it was not.

It has no future but itself,
Its infinite realms contain
Its past, enlightened to perceive
New periods of pain.