Many people I know are talking about pain right now in the midst of isolation during the COVID-19 pandemic. We’re all a bit flummoxed by it because most of us are working from home, if not out of work, and inside 90% of the time. We’re not working hard physically. Why all the pain?
I’ve had a nasty migraine coming and going for over a week. A friend of mine, who’s had a bad knee for a few years, is experiencing debilitating pain in her other knee. Another friend, usually healthy, feels achy all over, like she has, you know, the flu, but she doesn’t.
I think about how to describe pain a lot, because I’m writing a memoir in which a lot of pain happens, both emotional and physical. Much of it is recurring, especially stomach pain, and I have to invent new ways of saying the same thing over and over. “My stomach hurts.”
Emily Dickenson’s “Pain — Has an Element of Blank — “ speaks directly about the expansivene nature of pain, how it folds back in on itself to continue:
Pain — has an Element of Blank —
It cannot recollect
When it begun — or if there were
A time when it was not —It has no Future — but itself —
Its Infinite contain
Its Past — enlightened to perceive
New Periods — of Pain.
Here’s one called “Mirror” by Kurdish poet Kajal Ahmad. He expresses pain through the metaphor of a shattered mirror (translation by Michael R. Burch):
The obscuring mirror of my era
broke
because it magnified the small
and made the great seem insignificant.
Dictators and monsters monopolized its maze.
Now when I breathe
its jagged shards pierce my heart
and instead of sweat
I exude glass.
Write a poem about pain. It is the great common denominator of humanity. How does it connect or divide us? What, if anything, does it teach us? Does pain carry inherent meaning or reason, or does it signify only chaos and loss?How little or big can it be? How broad or personal?
Try writing through metaphor, like Ahmad does in “Mirror,” by finding an object or action (broken mirror piercing lungs) that signifies emotional pain.
