Compassionate Heart By Alison Hurst

This poem was first published in Emerging Possibilities ezine on the 1st December 2025. Content warning: included references to child neglect and trauma.

Compassionate Heart 

They sit and look straight into my heart and ask why.

“Why can’t we love?”

“Why, when love sings to us, do we quake in our beds, terrified of saying Yes?”

“Why, when days of laughing at each other’s jokes leads to smashed plates and spaghetti littering the kitchen floor?”.

“Why, when finally our pain is heard and matched by a mirroring pain, it all turn to shit?”

“You are not broken,

You are not indelibly marked,

You are not faulty.

You are traumatized by love gone wrong,

Not because of what you did,

That is impossible…

… you were only six”.

I seek their gaze.

“You’re wounded…

By unmitigated distress that the progenitor could not hold,

The velocity of anguish smashed your trust in all others”.

A tender possibility glimmers in their eyes,

Something I say reaches them.

Some infinitesimal truth sneaks through the barricade

To bring to light the “Little One”,

The part who still bears the cuts and bruises.

The want to protect the child from harsh memories is here as we talk

Of the hoarder’s lounge room,

The absent parent’s breakfast table,

The alcoholic’s trashed garden.

We both stare back,

Frozen.

For one knows the power that is here,

The other is reminded of lost embraces that linger near.

“Go on, just say hello,

 you’ll know what to do,

love is here”.

A smirk in the corner of their tightened lip loosens the guard’s grip on their heart.

“Remember that little one? They are still here, can you feel it?”

A single orb rises upon their eyelid, wetting the lashes,

Sliding gentle down their lined, hollowed cheek.

I want desperately to catch it,

Yet it is not my diamond to keep.

Suddenly, as if by the Divine Mother, traces Grace through the air,

They touch the tear with tenderness,

Like that reserved for a baby,

The frightened, wounded child found in a soiled bed.

They lean into the cries of the past and remain there,

Listening to what happened without fear,

Only complete compassion.

Finally in one small moment, on an average day like Tuesday,

They do not run away

But stand fiercely loving the one that got left behind.