A charm

an older poem about belief (and love)

photo by E. Ashley Shain

If you’d like to listen to this poem be read to you (nothing fancy here, I recorded it off my phone with a small stutter and all), here it is:

You could become incredibly dangerous.

Not in a moment, but over time.
If someone said, for example,

“I believe you” 

over and over 

each time you thought you wouldn’t be believed,
while you are telling tales horrific and tall-walking, tall-sounding
said this like a magic charm to you, to the air surrounding you
it could suspend time – for a moment – it could suspend 
disbelief itself, your own and others accumulated over time.

it could lead you to tell yourself and others too,
“I believe you.” Almost the best phrase in any language
second only to “I love you” which when you finally hear
“I believe you” you realize it pales in comparison. 

Believing is love being willing to look at itself.

It could lead you to believe things you never thought you could.
It could lead you to entertain all sorts of feelings and thoughts
crazy ideas, to believe them, if just for an instant enough to 
understand them. Even casting them off, 
it would be more like rain falling and less like
something that caustically pulled apart seams.
Logic can be used to rip apart things, people, bodies until
there is not much left but shreds and shrapnel of soul.
You can dress it up well, but it will not be whole. 

You will no longer recognize yourself in the mirror.

Belief is necessary. Belief is the basis of you surviving
in this world. As a young child your parents believed you
into being. You never stopped needing to be believed,
did you? The power of belief is to call things into being
that don’t yet exist. This is the danger of believing untrue
things, unkind things, that maladies and illnesses abound.
That kindness is a scant and fleeting memory 
you had from a long ago.

Certainly, bad things exist. I’m not asking you to believe
that they don’t. But you don’t have to believe 
that they hold the power to control everything you do, 
that pain has to shape every action you take, every thing you think.

If you can call on belief to see what could be you could see
things like: how you were never fully and totally alone, how
you were loved at least once in one moment, how you could
love someone or something small or sad once again and in that
loving you could be opened up to believing in anything or anyone,
eventually.

If you ever held a small creature and willed it not to die,
you believed in something. If you ever prayed to no god, only to the air
to do well, to finally get there, to be happy, to be able to get 
through this thing, then you know what it means to open
yourself up to belief. There is no god needed; the only necessary ingredient
is imagining something else that does not yet know itself
could come to know itself. 


Even you.



- E. Ashley Shain

Songs:

1. Frankie Goes to Hollywood - “The Power of Love”

I just saw the 2023 movie All of Us Strangers, so I have to include this. Watch it. It’s an amazing queer love story, and so much more. It also has great Rotten Tomatoes ratings, if you’re into that sort of thing. As for the song, it brings all the 80’s cheese that you could promise, and yet I still think it is able to transmit something even through the cheese that is very moving (or maybe I am still just reeling from the movie and the song’s role in it! Find our for yourself ~)

2. Red Chili Peppers’ - “Snow (Hey Oh)”

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