Healing Words E-Book

Dawn Beasley

• Herausgeber: Europa Edizioni
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Beschreibung

Born of personal experience this anthology is representative of a heartfelt poetry collection by Anglo Asian born author Dawn Beasley.
The collection is the fruit of trauma and her extremely difficult experiences including being a cancer sufferer who lost her ability to paint because of it. 
The poems are pregnant with desperation and hope, faith and doubts, fear and ultimate courage that has helped Dawn in overcoming each new challenge. It is through faith and help from supporting family and friends that Dawn has managed to focus on her writing abilities giving birth to a profound, touching selection of poems reflecting her personal state of mind and her physical struggle for survival. Ultimately Healing Words is a compendium of cathartic proportions leading to a sense of liberation and resulting in a generous transmission of grief and positive and optimistic vibrations for the reader to thoroughly enjoy and suffer at the same time.

Dawn Beasley was born into an Anglo Asian family in 1952. She grew up in North London amongst a fair deal of colour prejudice. She soon found she had a natural flair for languages which became apparent in her later years at school and has now come to the fore. 
Her Christian faith, love of people, adoption of two daughters and care for their well-being through serious personal traumas over the years brought her to a place of using her gifting in writing to release emotion and enable others to do the same. 
Dawn’s once fine art skills disappeared after her battle with major oesophageal cancer in 2013. What she found she could not do with a paintbrush anymore seemed to accelerate her ability to write and she has been encouraged by numerous people to publish what now has become Healing Words her heartfelt and touching poetry collection.

Leseprobe

DAWN BEASLEY

HEALING WORDS

© 2023 Europe Books | London

www.europebooks.co.uk | [email protected]

ISBN 9791220140324

First edition: July 2023

HEALING WORDS

Preface

Born of personal experience this anthology is representative of a heartfelt poetry production by Anglo Asian born author Dawn Beasley.

The poetry collection is the fruit of her tragic and extremely difficult experience as a cancer sufferer who lost her ability to paint because of it.

From the first pages we perceive the necessity to find some interior peace that the author reveals gradually finding comfort in her faith: indeed God is always present in her difficult journey, He is a relief, like she passionately describes in one of first poems, ‘Comforts’:

Perhaps it is that you are feeling

Desolate and alone

But He is there

Despite your grieving

To comfort, also heal

Over the coming days and weeks

We pray God’s strengthening power

His hand to hold

His arms embrace

His peace through every hour

The inexorable passing of time takes turns with moments of joy and moments of tears and pain.

Mercy and grace are sought with the desire to overcome that deep vulnerability that makes her weak, defenceless but nonetheless always hopeful.

Sometimes nightmares materialise, sometimes she finds herself in a tunnel with no end, with events overlapping.

What Dawn demonstrates is that from traumatic events it is possible to recover if we are close to God.

Her poetry reflects a cathartic process of releasing anguish and the building up of hope and faith.

A gathering of thoughts beautifully written, passionately assembled and executed.

8

Acknowledgments

To my dear husband Roger whom I am indebted to standing alongside me through endless years of heartache, illness, sorrow and grief. Though we faced many trials we have had an incredible journey of faith and ministry to others that has enabled us in all these circumstances. I began to write in the midst of such pain and grief.

I am forever grateful for our two very special adopted daughters without whom much of this book would not have been written.

My work is the unfolding of events I both witnessed and experienced over the years. I found that writing released tension amidst suffering and that words would flow freely as I did so. Many friends including authors Nick and Lois Cuthbert and also the late Craig Dinsell encouraged me to publish my writings most of which are quite short but they can sum up in a few sentences or a poem exactly what that person needs to hear.

Introduction

HEALING WORDS

There is not a circumstance or event in our lives that I believe God is unaware of. We are different in personality and mindset. Some of us have aspired to great heights while others are still on a journey of discovery. Whatever our backgrounds, abilities or disabilities and whether we use or even can develop our potential are all factors known to God.

‘Whether you’re angry or whether you’re spent, either in grief or continued lament, you need words to release such emotions. I can help. I can supply that in words’.

Personal childhood grief, illnesses that could have silenced hope, dealing with damaged children and young adults, prayer counselling and voluntary prison work led me to seek God’s heart. What would He say to the hurting? I found a freedom in writing and in speaking because I took the time to listen to God throughout. I found that what I put in words had and still has the effect of releasing people in distress giving a unique and potent perspective for each individual.

It may even be humour that people need! I have been writing for twenty years but have only now decided to publish my work.

I am very grateful to still be alive. It would appear that there is more for me yet to do and share even with my near death illness in 2004 and later an aggressive cancer journey in 2013 both involving surgery and endless months of recovery.

My heart’s desire is to enable individuals to see that the pursuit of and trust in God is not a futile journey butone of profound faith that can equip in every circumstance.

Dawn Beasley

CAN YOU LIFT THE PIANO?

They know I can’t do that, so why do they say it? It gets me really mad. I’m very cross because I want to know, and they won’t tell me. All they keep saying is, ‘Well, can you lift the piano?’ It’s so stupid them asking.

I want to know. I must know. I think they are hiding something really important from me and I’m getting worried. What if? What if something really bad has happened like in that film I watched at Nanny’s? The parents told the little girl they were coming back, and I believed them. And then, that awful thing happened. I can hardly speak. They died in a fire. They are NEVER coming back.

What if that is what they won’t tell me? Oh no! That couldn’t be, could it? That’s what I have to ask them. I have to know that nothing terrible has happened to my Mum.

Ever since I can remember, I’ve told everyone I’ve got two mummies and daddies. I can’t understand why no-one believes me or is interested when I say so. Why do they act in such a horrid way to me at school? I call the people I live with ‘mummy’ and ‘daddy’, but they’re not really. I’m going to be with my own Mum soon.

“If you really want to talk about it, you’ll have to wait until Daddy comes home,” Mummy said gently.

I leapt out of my chair and into the hall as soon as I heard daddy’s car on the drive. “No, sit down!” Mummy said firmly, “and let Daddy have his tea first.”

I waited patiently. He seemed to take an age to finish. I couldn’t wait anymore, “nothing like that ever happened to my real Mummy, did it?”

There was such a long pause. I felt scared inside. Daddy took me in his arms and sat me on his lap, and Mummy was very still. I tried not to look at her because I was frightened, and sometimes she seemed so serious. “Darling, I have to tell you that your Mummy is dead,” he said quietly. He spoke tenderly to me for ages, but I couldn’t hear another word after that. I felt dead inside. A knife had struck my heart and I was weeping, crying frantically. It couldn’t be. I felt I was drowning. Not one ounce of hope left. I was never going to meet her.

But I had spent my life dreaming of the day when I would, what I would say to her, what she might look like. It was a horrid dream. “Please, stop it and let me wake up!” - “But I never got the chance to say goodbye to her!” And by now the tears were pouring down my face. They were so kind to me. They had such love in their eyes, but it was no good. It wasn’t going to bring my own Mummy back.

It was then they showed me a picture from a book, and read something to me from it. Then the book disappeared, for a very long time, and although I asked about it, they wouldn’t tell me where it was. I decided in my mind that I would find it again one day. They said that when I was stronger and older, I could have “the information.” I am beginning to hate them. How dare they keep me from my real Mummy!

GRIEF DENIED

Did you know of the tears we cried? When your mother died Yes, when your mother died?

It was all so confusing

For her death

It seemed intrusive even then

And we wept so many tears

On your behalf

Throughout the years

Through all those years

Tell me, what were we supposed to do? For now we had adopted you?

You had come to join our family

And you completed our identity And we loved you Oh, how we loved you!

And we still do

The journey’s been an uphill climb

We’d thought that it would be just fine

But it hasn’t been, no, it hasn’t been

But we’re still praying

Now that’s the point I want to make to you

That your Maker knows what’s best for you

He’s got a plan that’s best it’s true

So try believing

Yes, try believing

DESERT SPRING

I am in a dry and barren land

The wilderness is more familiar

Than I would like

I am parched and weary Is there no future?

No solace for my grief?

Surely there is hope

In You Lord God

EMOTION PROTECTION

I’ve become locked into the rut of my emotions

Locked out by those words - Exclusion zone

I feel angry and hurt and desperately sad Why should I react so strongly or suffer so acutely?

Is it because I am yet unhealed?

I think You need to touch that core of rejection Lord I know when it was ... You know too Will it ever be healed?

Can You make me whole?

Psychological scars take for ages to fade

Especially when inflicted at so early an age And by those we could never imagine would betray us

Come and touch my pain Lord

It is so very deep - I lay it bare before You now

Not to cover it again

Except with Your love and healing balm

I’m trusting You for the way ahead

For the future that You say belongs to me

Help me walk in my inheritance

PAIN RELIEF

Lord, take off every layer

Each layer that causes pain

The pain that comes from grief

That costs us unbelief

And wrap me round with love

Your love that does abound

And put Your joy within

For there I will be found

SPECIALIST ANALYSIS

“The children are so resilient!” she said in full flow, and completely ignoring wide eyed Gemma with her mother, who sat opposite Susan Ellis, the Consultant Psychologist. It was only her second visit, and Gemma bit her lip nervously.

Ms Ellis talked quickly and quietly, while Gemma wondered when she would pause for breath. She was watching her broad chin which seemed to gather momentum as her lips spouted a profusion of words she hardly heard. Gemma could never concentrate on long sentences.

She was already visiting her ‘other world’ which was far safer than sitting in Child Psychiatry. Why couldn’t they leave her alone anyway?

She didn’t want to talk about ‘secrets’ because it made her feel really uncomfortable. Her skin tightened around her clenched fists and she rubbed one thumb over the other for comfort. How could she escape? It was what her mum called, “an ordeal.”

FROM ME TO YOU

I’m grateful

Successful or not, I have survived.

I made it through rejection, separation and isolation.

I had few friends at school

Was bullied at home

I experienced depression for years But I found God, or rather He found me.

Sometimes it feels lonely

When you cannot voice your pain

And silence shrouds your heartache time and time again

Clouds of desperation so easily envelop

But then we must remember, hope is not far away We are not alone because the Creator is near, so very near.

HE COUNTS MY TEARS

The obstacles along my path

Are thorny, spiked and long

And I know I have not planted

In my garden this sad song So I turn to You again, dear Lord And plead with You for grace.

For no-one else can really know

The trials that I face

When hope is dim, I still cry out

Because You know my heart

And even though I’m weary

It’s the place where You impart

That peace and restoration

That inner strength, Your touch

For weak and burdened travellers

The ones You love so much

WHO IS THE PATIENT?

For a duration of thirty, maybe forty minutes

The tension mounted first distanced in silence

Then the odd comment between him and his daughter

Time ticking on impatience rising

Two more daughters descended from

‘the room upstairs’

Where children disappear for a while…

Why the tirade of abuse and foul language In the presence of one so small as she?