It Takes Courage Some Days To Rise From My Bed

When my head feels like a soiled pillow with half the stuffing gone

It takes courage some days to rise from my bed
when my head feels like a soiled pillow
with half the stuffing gone.

It takes courage not to push away the cats
mewing for their breakfast
with predictable insistence.

Courage to resist the easy escape of sleep.
To float with benign indifference
in a sea of unmet obligations.

To hoard every scrap of energy
for a more beguiling day, when depression does not squat
like a gremlin on my chest.

There are days when I rise and make my bed
with something resembling alacrity,
before I have a chance to second guess my actions

or wonder should I bother
to emerge from my tattered cocoon,
stuck to the underside of a bug-bitten leaf,

one of thousands
of millions of leaves and lives
battered by rain and wind

only to let go at last
to swell the pile of withered leaves
and stillborn butterflies stacked beneath the trees.

A hopeless fate it seems, yet I try to remember
the necessity of decay. The cycle of life.
Let the circle be unbroken. . .

Today, with this poem, I have taken a step.
I have decided to be courageous.
To feed the cats. To step outside. To admire the leaves.

I wish to thank Christina M. Ward and the POM for this brave and sometimes heartbreaking prompt. I welcome the opportunity to explore a condition I live with and silently struggle with, and have since I was a young woman.

I wrote a poem on a similar theme, more than a year ago. Here’s the poem if you wish to read it. Thank you, Debbie

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