Gabriella Speaks -- Healing from Childhood Trauma

My neighbor who appears indifferent to others is caught peeping out her window. Reminds me of Neil Diamond singing in "Crunchy Granola Suite." "There once was a man with a tiger outside his gate, Well he just couldn't relax and he couldn't relate..." Now he can relate since Crunchy Granola set him free. My neighbor never found her way out. Who or what is the tiger outside your gate?

Be kind to others whenever you can!

This is my healing and sharing place. I am a survivor as well as a poet and an artist. In these ways I am sometimes able to give a voice to my inner selves and a name to my pain. I think if we speak of our expriences, process and healing journey, we'll heal, and maybe so will some who hurt us. I am a woman living with a dissociative disability, and this site is the voice of my personalities and my self. �

Fragment

When bat wings look like holly leaves

and berries bleed upon the bush

I see her standing golden black

sun-leathered and sinewy --

Alice, lithe and tall.

By moonlight she mounts Banshee.

Flank to flank they sweat

horse, grange goddess, poised to hunt.

Bobcat in forest creeps, lion eyes peer

out of the skull of the child

in whose veins the creature's blood pulses

and in whose heart beats the terror

of the victim/she-cat for life and cubs.

Fingers claw/claws finger the air.

Unmoved Alice sits on Banshee --

mounted lithe and tall.

Shallow Wind

Blue is not the color of mountains, he said.

She knew her man was wrong. Loving

Blue notes on silver wisp she was

Strong in purple gown. Joe had forgotten

the color of things. So she sang for her sister.

She sang a ballad of the Blue Ridge.

Sax glistened liquid wails.

Sister chanted plainsong

on a painted desert stage --

chanted of her mother's breast formed dunes.

Sandblocks cacaphonous filled the room.

Joe wanted to go home where houses were painted and mountains green.

So she sang another ballad.

Sang about Kentucky where Joe knew the grass was blue.

Women's voices blended

Carried on wild wind to a state in Arizona

and they sang a sacred ballad

of a world named Shallow Wind.