This is an account of a woman, herself severely injured during an attack in Sudan and who witnessed the murder of her babe.

It’s A Suffered Life

Gilded grace

Upon

Darkness.

Tomorrow’s Heart

Becomes the custom for sorrow.

Fragmented faces

Forgetting

The

Eyes of those who

Beg to look afar.

From the soul

Taken.

Fierce fears

Forcing the

Cradle of creation

To fall.

The blessed babe

Departs.

Unto distance

Never remembering the

Memory.

And the Mother

Sees the kill

Of her

Blood.

A suffered life.

It’s a suffered life.

How can medicine treat the heart? Wounds can be stitched but when the gaping cuts have been closed, what do they conceal other than a blood that cannot escape but through the words of her story, of her life. Her loss continues to ebb through her scar, through her veins, into the hands of the despairing physician. Until, the healing talent of medicine recognises that sometimes continuing to live means continuing to hurt. A suffered life is just that. It is life as we know it, the heart beating, pulsating throughout the body and the eyes opening to our home, our country before us yet with suffering as parallel. It is in someone’s home, it inhabits a country of its own rules and purposes. It is inextricably tied to the battle of medicine: the quest to heal, to soothe wounds until words no longer need to bleed.