DEEP DIVE
I sat on my front porch in spring 2020. Globally, we all know the season: shutdown COVID-19. At that time, I taught in public school and lived in Tyrrell County, a rural-remote area an hour’s drive from the Outer Banks, North Carolina.
With high school remote in March 2020, my front porch was my sanctuary.
My companions were creatures of nature: the birdsong a constant solace, the flutter of the butterflies in the azalea bush, and even the lizards that checked in on me while I checked them out. Black bear plopped down on the wheat field. A little cub danced around the light pole in my backyard. Red Fox poked their heads out of the corn patch. A Great Horned Owl perched on my backyard clothesline and flew to sit right in front of me on my front porch. A dragonfly rested on my teacup and sometimes my toes while we relaxed—I in my beach chair—with a book and a writing journal.
Poetry poured out of me on paper, like “ripping those veins right out of my skin”. I had no real desire to publish poetry. I just needed to make sense of it all—or to be more honest—“sit with sorrow”. Writing grounded me like the “pen waits to grasp the common word”. I knew I had to write. I had a story to tell, a memoir in poetry.
In those pandemic years, the dragonfly gave me vision. Never let up. I struggled to know whether to return to public school—now hybrid. My big head attached to my little neck hurt, but I found the courage to click on the teacher’s online survey: “I’m not a robot.” I’m legit; I’m in. I returned to school even though I was closing in on 70 years of age.
My front porch sitting and writing poetry did not stop. My well was overflowing with water, trees, plants, and flowers and more creatures of nature giving imagery to my voice. In the front yard, I watched a Northern Cardinal, masked up with its little red coat on, dip for food. I absorbed droplets of hope, writing about the injured bird getting well from the care of a nurse.
I was the wounded cardinal, and it was time to write about my breakdown, in hope that my poetry might be moving and healing to those who have had to live in and come from “hell back,” “like a prison of seaweed twisted and torn with a rancor odor not even bathing could cleanse”. As early as Fall 2020, I shared my poems with an audience through publication. I was fortunate these nature images connected with people that read them. I kept teaching and writing and getting published. I returned to revising poems I had written when I taught and lived and broke down in Oklahoma City. At age 35, I had stood on the steps of a university and asked a psychotherapist for help.
The breakdown was long and hard, and “my smudged-over lies” from shame and psychotic guilt made my “longing of a constant tree” with early on-set depression severe. The medical prognosis was not good, even to the point that perhaps long-term institutionalization with heavy drugs might be the best that could be done. But nearly 40 years later and with therapy since 1987, “the tree pruned from brittle branches” is “no longer distanced from the wind breathing mass into the rib”. This poem, my first published poem, the year 2003, tells where I have come from.
All these years and especially from 2020 to 2023, each day sitting on my front porch, I stayed in the present, the fog serving as a moving map, a guide when fear rises early in the morning. School was back in-person with some hybrid class settings from quarantines, and the ocean was an hour’s drive away.
Summer 2022, it was time to visit the ocean. For two to three days every week that summer, I heard the waves sing their lullaby of surrender to me. Ocean sounds “released my sobs without shame” and my ocean poems took a deep dive to write about redemptive suffering, healing from childhood trauma. As I took refuge on a bed of twigs in the sand, the waves deposited matter into the sea and carried my cargo to rest.
Healing is a long, hard thing. I come full circle back to the roots where “the tree lets go, knows a peace with living and dying”. I have come from a childhood with no memory before repeated rape—mentally before physically—to drifting aimlessly at sea in early adulthood and now to more than 35 years as an adult of therapeutic healing. I have scar tissue that I sometimes feel in the night. But the wound has healed, and the sickness will not go back into my head.
I know, no matter the loss, the wind-breath carries redemptive suffering. My debut full-length poetry collection, Deep Dive, celebrates the holy path of walking with courage, hope, and love.
Karen Carter
June 23, 2024
Winston-Salem, North Carolina
With high school remote in March 2020, my front porch was my sanctuary.
My companions were creatures of nature: the birdsong a constant solace, the flutter of the butterflies in the azalea bush, and even the lizards that checked in on me while I checked them out. Black bear plopped down on the wheat field. A little cub danced around the light pole in my backyard. Red Fox poked their heads out of the corn patch. A Great Horned Owl perched on my backyard clothesline and flew to sit right in front of me on my front porch. A dragonfly rested on my teacup and sometimes my toes while we relaxed—I in my beach chair—with a book and a writing journal.
Poetry poured out of me on paper, like “ripping those veins right out of my skin”. I had no real desire to publish poetry. I just needed to make sense of it all—or to be more honest—“sit with sorrow”. Writing grounded me like the “pen waits to grasp the common word”. I knew I had to write. I had a story to tell, a memoir in poetry.
In those pandemic years, the dragonfly gave me vision. Never let up. I struggled to know whether to return to public school—now hybrid. My big head attached to my little neck hurt, but I found the courage to click on the teacher’s online survey: “I’m not a robot.” I’m legit; I’m in. I returned to school even though I was closing in on 70 years of age.
My front porch sitting and writing poetry did not stop. My well was overflowing with water, trees, plants, and flowers and more creatures of nature giving imagery to my voice. In the front yard, I watched a Northern Cardinal, masked up with its little red coat on, dip for food. I absorbed droplets of hope, writing about the injured bird getting well from the care of a nurse.
I was the wounded cardinal, and it was time to write about my breakdown, in hope that my poetry might be moving and healing to those who have had to live in and come from “hell back,” “like a prison of seaweed twisted and torn with a rancor odor not even bathing could cleanse”. As early as Fall 2020, I shared my poems with an audience through publication. I was fortunate these nature images connected with people that read them. I kept teaching and writing and getting published. I returned to revising poems I had written when I taught and lived and broke down in Oklahoma City. At age 35, I had stood on the steps of a university and asked a psychotherapist for help.
The breakdown was long and hard, and “my smudged-over lies” from shame and psychotic guilt made my “longing of a constant tree” with early on-set depression severe. The medical prognosis was not good, even to the point that perhaps long-term institutionalization with heavy drugs might be the best that could be done. But nearly 40 years later and with therapy since 1987, “the tree pruned from brittle branches” is “no longer distanced from the wind breathing mass into the rib”. This poem, my first published poem, the year 2003, tells where I have come from.
All these years and especially from 2020 to 2023, each day sitting on my front porch, I stayed in the present, the fog serving as a moving map, a guide when fear rises early in the morning. School was back in-person with some hybrid class settings from quarantines, and the ocean was an hour’s drive away.
Summer 2022, it was time to visit the ocean. For two to three days every week that summer, I heard the waves sing their lullaby of surrender to me. Ocean sounds “released my sobs without shame” and my ocean poems took a deep dive to write about redemptive suffering, healing from childhood trauma. As I took refuge on a bed of twigs in the sand, the waves deposited matter into the sea and carried my cargo to rest.
Healing is a long, hard thing. I come full circle back to the roots where “the tree lets go, knows a peace with living and dying”. I have come from a childhood with no memory before repeated rape—mentally before physically—to drifting aimlessly at sea in early adulthood and now to more than 35 years as an adult of therapeutic healing. I have scar tissue that I sometimes feel in the night. But the wound has healed, and the sickness will not go back into my head.
I know, no matter the loss, the wind-breath carries redemptive suffering. My debut full-length poetry collection, Deep Dive, celebrates the holy path of walking with courage, hope, and love.
Karen Carter
June 23, 2024
Winston-Salem, North Carolina
Karen Carter takes the path that so many poets have followed to contemplate what their lives have meant, not only for themselves but also for a poesy of love and forgiveness.
In Deep Dive, her first book of poetry, Karen looks back at her life—through eloquence, beauty, truth, and pain—to finally accept the reality of her estrangement from herself.
In twenty-four poems, she replays her life story, beginning with her childhood trauma, and in her later years, bridges the path of enlightenment and self-awareness.
For her, Deep Dive is a mindful poetic presence, as she writes in the poem, “Back to the Roots”: “I no longer need / a mustard seed to grow./ My interior tells me / the time has come to shed the exterior, / like the full-blown tree knows / it must give up its centerpiece / cornucopia, its fruits and flowers, / so that the tree returns to its roots.”
Such is the gift of Karen’s deep dive just as her epiphany is to lifelong revelation.
Sandra Fluck
Editor
The Write Launch