Jim Murdoch wrote a poem in response to my post, Clouds.
I have been on an online colloquium for the past two weeks discussing a paper on the issue of boundary violations among those who work psychoanalytically.
In many ways the topic skirts around one of the greatest taboos, that of incest. In his poem Jim explores his response to the experience.
Thanks, Jim, for giving me the okay to post this poem. As I’ve seen from the recent closed colloquium, incest is still one of the great unspeakables.
Lacunae
Back then she didn’t have the words;
it was all ‘stuff’ and ‘things’
but mostly blanks.
Now she knows all the proper words,
every euphemism
and dirty word.
The proper words don’t sound right though;
there was nothing proper
in what he did
just a lot of stuff with things and
stuffing things in places
without real names.
Nothing is real without its name.
Back then she learned the names
Pain, Guilt and Shame
because what happened then was real
but it only became
real when she said
its name out loud for the first time.
Jim Murdoch
Wednesday, 04 May 2011