Louise Mathewson

A Day

It’s a brand new day
just woke
from a coma
been gone
so long
knocked out-
side myself,
how to get back;
the task
before me.

I am
pure
consciousness,
spirit
separated
from her vessel,
yearn to come back
all the way
to my toes
set them upon
this hallowed ground.

Every day
I get to try
to come back.
My purpose now
to come home,
to knit
the pieces of my soul
together.

My skin
can’t feel,
those feet, ah
they run clumsily
without me inside of them.
Legs?
What do my feet attach to?
Where is the ground?
I ask.

* * *

FORCED RETREAT

Brain injury
a forced retreat
from my constructed life
as wife and mother
no more business as usual.

I was sent to the womb
to its safe darkness
floated to unknown territory
to find the seed
of my new soul.

I nurtured
watered
fed it
in the dark
with silence
roots grew
slowly
down to earth’s core
grounding me in a new self.

* * *

LOST

I lost the map
inside my brain,
neurons stretched
beyond their reach.

Now messages
stopped in their tracks
can’t find their way.
They must discover
other routes
to make connections.

New roads
need to be created.
A fresh map
must be drawn.

Louise Mathewson lives with her husband in Eden Prairie, MN. She is also a mother and grandmother. She has been published in the first volume of Cup of Comfort, and several other magazines. Mathewson loves to find the sacred in an ordinary experience and share that moment with others. In January of 2003 she suffered a traumatic brain injury followed by PTSD in a car accident. In the last two years as her brain continues to heal, she has used writing poetry to help in the emotional part of her healing process.