“At the day’s end I found

Nightfall wrapped about a stone.

I took the stone in my hand,
The shadowy surfaces of life unwound,
And within I found
A bird’s fine bone.

I warmed the relic in my hand
Until a living heart
Beat, and the tides flowed
Above, below, within.

There came a boat riding the storm of blood
And in the boat a child,

In the boat a child
Riding the waves of song,
Riding the waves of pain.”

— Kathleen Raine ‘Three Poems of Incarnation’ I

Today I have a lot of pain. My muscles are weak, especially in my back. Everything feels tight and I will rest most of the day.

Before this illness, I was a relative novice when it came to pain.  Most of what I experienced in early life was the acute pain that comes from a relatively soft body meeting a rather harder object in the form of tables, pavements, tree branches and even the bony parts of other human beings.  The vagaries of chronic pain were certainly an unknown quantity.

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