Deborah Guzzi - Growing Pains

Deborah Guzzi is a healing facilitator, healing through touch and the written word. She has written three books. The Hurricane available now through Prolific Press, The Healing Heart, and Heaven & Hell in a Nutshell.  Her poetry appears in Journals & Literary Reviews in Canada, Australia, Hong Kong, Singapore, New Zealand, Greece, India and dozens of others in the USA. 

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​                   Growing Pains
 
The room, dark with shadow, swamped with fear.                                                                           
Unseen, the tooth and claw of nightmare tore her sleep.                                                      
Her thin legs in constant cramp from dream running.
She was only a child, but not the only child,
beside her, across a gap of oaken floor,
in a matching bed, I sleep.
 
Her whimpering brought me near, Tell me
good things, she’d plead. Make my dreams sweet.
I would snuggle her close.
 
Warm kittens, I’d chant chocolate bunnies to chomp.
Butterflies on your fingertip, snow on your nose.
 
The memories linger on. Her wet cheeks and sheets
of woe night after night, where did Daddy go?
The small girl began to grow, to shield with the
only things she knew food, with food for thought and
form sated, sleep came easier.
 
She grew through the nightmare of longing—our home;
she grew to and past me: little mother, big mother.
She sang the songs of love to dolls, to dogs, to stray
dust-motes and flew.
 
Too sweet to linger in the lost land, where battles
must be found and fought. Too dear to go through life alone;
need garnered, family formed, upon the rack of sustenance
and the twist of genetic curdling’s; she blooms, still.
 
Barricaded at intervals from the nightmares,
cramped with too large a soul in too fragile
a form, sister mine, friend of all.