Find A Space Poem by gershon hepner

When your life is full of sorrow,
find a space
where you displace
the past, so you can find tomorrow.
Landing like a parachute
on others
never bothers
friends, but can’t reconstitute
your joy. In order to expand,
you have to build
on space unfilled,
that you alone can understand.

Inspired by words spoken by Ingrid Betancourt, recently released after six years of captivity in the deep Colombian jungle, in an interview with Steven Erlanger (“Freed Colombian Grapples With Recalling and Releasing Pain, and Resuming Life, ” NYT, July 11,2008) :
Ingrid Betancourt fears the collapse she knows is coming. A week after her sudden rescue from more than six years of captivity in the deep Colombian jungle, Ms. Betancourt looks healthy, even elegant in a black pantsuit and white linen blouse, a gold Cartier watch on her wrist, setting off the crude rosary she made of buttons and the lanyard her guerrilla captors used to make straps for their rifles. But she spoke of her fragility in an interview on Thursday, and of her deep Roman Catholic faith. And she knows how quickly her adrenaline is dropping. “It’s like the roaring of the waves, I know it’s coming, and it’s getting closer, ” she said softly, in English. “So I know it’s time for me just to stop. I don’t want to be submerged by depression.”..Asked about her rosary, she called it, in humor, “an error.” She said she recalled her father saying the rosary, but could not remember exactly how it worked, how many times she was supposed to pray to the Virgin Mary. “So I thought, in case it’s not 10, maybe 15, ” she said, fingering the rosary’s 15 buttons, from a jacket the guerrillas had given her.God is personal to her, she said. “I know that I talk to him, and that he responds.” People dismiss the miraculous, she said, and “prefer talking about coincidences, ” but “what I think about miracles is that it happens all the time to everybody.” Ms. Betancourt, tired, still has other interviews to give. But her time of publicity is ending, she said, speaking of her children, Lorenzo,19, and Mélanie,22, who were with her on Thursday. “I know that now this is the time to retreat, to be with my family, to find a space for my life, ” she said, her voice breaking. “You know, I’m landing like a parachute in the life of others. They have their own lives, their daily activities. And I don’t have anything. “Six days ago I was chained to a tree, ” she said. “And I’m now free, and I’m trying to understand how I’m going to live from now on.”

7/11/08