Poetry by Jane Grovijahn

    Damian Munoz CC




Winter’s edge
​
Wintering with my wounds
brings a bitter
bluster of reality
buffering my spirit.
Memory is charged:
not to take me
back
to old grievances and bad habits
where daily doses of self-destruction nibble on me
quietly, with confidence.

My command on memory
of harm
requires a longhouse
of mulching
protecting me from being
frozen
in despair
(long enough
to ride my wounds
into pools of possibility
instead of fine palaces erected by pain.)





Winter’s fold around me

Trauma takes us all
into a torrential
triangle
where two sides so clearly intersect.
I search for that other side,
a third space
in the thickness of searing reminders
roving
freely,
fearlessly about me
fronting my soul
into a duality of bitterness split by rage.
I just have to wait,
hold onto myself
long enough
to find
that mysterious angle at which
the hurting
bends
into a place that neither houses death nor promises happy endings.

​Never just Winter nor Spring,
I calculate my steps
curiously
ready to stray
into thick hallow
buried just deep enough.





Winter’s bend 

Morning’s glory radiantly parades
its claim on us
without care to who we are or
what we have done.
Look at what the universe has done
with the ashes burnt,
spewed across the earth in fury,
blasts of chaotic beginnings
where life was battered,
toxic at first--
until that noxious base transgressed
into something utterly
unimaginable.
We all are rooted in that memory
of transgression.
Reminding us to resist building an easy entrance into damage,
to know our wholeness
has always carried powerful forces of destruction
scandalously beautiful
built upon
ancient foundations
mixed in this
glory.
​




Dr. Jane Grovijahn is a trauma theologian who sacrificed for too long at the altar of damage done. It was her wounds that propelled her into graduate school; once she realized that and decided to really explore their power, she was finally connected to her deepest authenticity and power.

She does theology from a place of pain and possibility (is female in social imaginary of misogyny, is queer in place of Christian nationalism that denies her sacred birthright, is sexual abuse survivor in world that normalizes gender-based violences directed especially at female+ persons). She knows well the holiness of how to navigate a body dredged by others.
​
Restless within tombs of other’s making, she now resides in sturdy structures of delight built from those places within us often hardest to relish but bursting with unpredictable pleasures. Here the power of wounds continues to surprise her with its call to community, rising into collective, riotous rites of repair.