In Rooms Off the Undertow

The dancing bears of old Poland

were trained as cubs.

Tied to an upturned drum,

a fire was lit underneath,

and when they began to hop with pain,

music was played, which, forever afterwards,

set them “dancing,” adoring audiences unaware

that they were witnessing PTSD.

Quiet faces were part of my music,

as I discovered in my fifties.

I saw them in rooms off the undertow

sliding me to sleep, after a day of struggling,

unsuccessfully, to rid my body of strange aches.

Officials, bosses and professors

from my distant past.

And my father.

Every skerrick of worry skeined up,

their faces were as lovely as the worn-down hills

of an ancient landscape;

yet what I felt was fear.

Something must have reminded me

of telling my father in my teens

that I’d decided to quit school.

Though seated at the desk

where he did the hated farm accounting,

he'd looked extremely relaxed as I approached him.

Fighting my way back to full consciousness,

I remembered him glaring,

and yelling, After I bought you all the books?

His response ended there, but I was deeply shocked,

for he was almost always kind,

his angry outbursts very rare.

Reminders of my mother's tirades and beatings,

like a harsh voice or a looming figure,

had once made me freeze, unable to think or speak,

sometimes for hours. But, by my fifties,

psychotherapy had scrubbed most of that away.

The quiet faces had been hidden

so deep in mind jungles,

they hadn’t heard the war was over.

Leila Kulpas has an Honors degree in English, as well as a Medical degree and a Fellowship in psychiatry. The author of a published memoir entitled, “Into the Eyes of Hungry: Growing up in the Wilds of Australia,” her prose has been published in The Vancouver Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy Review, The Pacific Rim Review of Books, a National Voices anthology and various newspapers, and her poetry in seven journals and seven anthologies.