Pain
Pain - meaning Summary
Pain Reconsidered as Survival
The speaker examines past emotional pain and how it shifts shape rather than vanishes. Using domestic and seaside imagery—cakes, pantry, a virgin beach—she traces moving from desperate attachment and self-poisoning to a quieter, detached survival. Pain once felt monstrous now sits contained: remembered but not throbbing. The poem ends in relief and steadiness, a sense of being hauled aboard after a storm and no longer defined by longing or fear.
Read Complete AnalysesWhere does pain go does it float off like flour in a wind leaving this one only to be baked by that one as her pain cake her bitter feast how is it that I lie here on a virgin beach palm trees drift-wood and parrots feeling nothing but the sun on my back missing no one not even the love of my life wherever he is whoever he’s with truly sometimes I can’t remember their names yet at the time I thought I’d die and almost did once no my pantry’s empty of cakes flour on the shelf I admit but snug in its bags no I’m not smug amazed grateful perplexed not counting the days nor afraid of the phone I always poisoned the chalice and the cake as we supped hard to swallow nowadays I look at it all with relief like someone hauled on board from a turbulent sea
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