There are ways of releasing the soul; of emptying the belly of pain, the head of aches, the heart of sorrow. To cry, alone, in the night; aloud, to a friend; To run away, forgetting; to run, forgetting; to sing, forgetting; To write, remembering, forever.

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This poem was an entry in my "journal" for a high school Creative Writing class -- one of only two poems among hundreds of pages otherwise limited to prose.

I wrote this poem at a time when I was still confused and devastated by childhood sexual abuse that had ended several years earlier.

My family just wanted me to forget and not think about it or talk about it -- a "conspiracy of silence" that permitted my brother (my abuser) to molest many more children for many more years.

At the time, it was vitally important to me that I not simply forget what happened to me. And yet it seems now that I did recognize the need to put the experience aside, to put it behind me, to put it in its place. More than a decade later, I spent three years in therapy to deal with this experience of being sexually abused, and in part as one of many experiences in my life, one of many influences helping to shape who I was.

And so, in this poem, I related some of the ways I tried to release the pain and burden, and my conclusion that the most appropriate method for me was to write about it.

This poem has great meaning for me. When I read it 15 years later, at the same time I was reading through hundreds of pages of private journals I had written from age 11 to 25, was an eye-opening experience for me as an adult, and an important part of the healing process. This poem reminded me of why I had written those pages, which seemed like such a gift as I worked to heal the very wounds those pages described.