callouses of surety

the value of glitches

my wounds are my strength:

as we go through life

we make mistakes

and we can never go back and correct them,

the universe, too, makes mistakes,

glitches for which there is no divine plan, 

despite how much we hope for one,

we can only hope to survive each glitch

and learn how to live with them,

I can never get past my father’s untimely death,

I can just learn to live with it,

and my turning away from him,

when I wish I’d turned toward him, and he to me, 

yet that wound in my soul

rubs off callouses of surety,

I feel the joy in the moment

and I feel toward the pain glitched onto others,

particularly my middle school students

who, too, have wounds from the gauntlets

through which they have to pass,

my wounds allow me to have strengths

I would never have had

if my way forward had just been easy.

by Henry H. Walker

September 24, ’15