The Pain Reliever

Carrie Olivia Adams

Silence is the sound the knife makes
slitting the skin.

Can you identify my weakness,
a pricking sensation
and numbness in one limb?
Can you hold this tongue?
Tell me, what is the function
of meticulous courage.

You are the most yourself
when you are in the motion.
One can be quick and too quick.
I have a stomach too.
It gets hungry.

If I be of necessity opportunity,
if there be the slightest chance of success,
why have a mind, if?

Does that scream in the night across the alley
beg an answer? Are we crowning
into the sludge of an injury and its repair?

An elephant is larger and stronger than a horse;
but it is not preferred as a beast of burden.

Strength is a wee umbrella in the storm.
This the friction sound heard
in inspiration, expiration, or both.
For convenience of description,
blood is bright red and frothy.

Have you earned the privilege
of making mistakes?
There really is no sex in science.
The nomenclature lifts
delicate subjects up from the plane
in which language places them.

Man has more strength,
woman, more endurance.

The hands and the instruments
are the chief sources of danger.
This fever.
There is no subject on which so much has been written
and so little known.

"Invictus" is a short poem by English poet William Ernest Henley. Henley wrote it in 1875, and in 1888 he published it in his first volume of poems, Book of Verses, in the section titled "Life and Death".

INVICTUS 👏🙏

Out of the night that covers me,

Black as the pit from pole to pole,

I thank whatever gods may be

For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance

I have not winced nor cried aloud.

Under the bludgeonings of chance

My head is bloody, but unbowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears

Looms but the Horror of the shade,

And yet the menace of the years

Finds and shall find me unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate,

How charged with punishments the scroll,

I am the master of my fate,

I am the captain of my soul

“Late August, given heavy rain and sun

For a full week, the blackberries would ripen.

At first, just one, a glossy purple clot

Among others, red, green, hard as a knot.

You ate that first one and its flesh was sweet

Like thickened wine: summer’s blood was in it

Leaving stains upon the tongue and lust for

Picking. Then red ones inked up and that hunger

Sent us out with milk cans, pea tins, jam-pots

Where briars scratched and wet grass bleached our boots.

Round hayfields, cornfields and potato-drills

We trekked and picked until the cans were full,

Until the tinkling bottom had been covered

With green ones, and on top big dark blobs burned

Like a plate of eyes. Our hands were peppered

With thorn pricks, our palms sticky as Bluebeard’s.

We hoarded the fresh berries in the byre.

But when the bath was filled we found a fur,

A rat-grey fungus, glutting on our cache.

The juice was stinking too. Once off the bush

The fruit fermented, the sweet flesh would turn sour.

I always felt like crying. It wasn’t fair

That all the lovely canfuls smelt of rot.

Each year I hoped they’d keep, knew they would not.”

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